Are there any planets harder than Eve in any planet packs?

[Sharpy]

I wonder, do any mods provide planets more difficult than Eve? Stock Tylo is harder for landing, but if you can't take off from Kerbin, you can take off from Tylo. There are the obvious impossibilities - can't land on gas giants, the Sun. But is there a mod with a planet that is more unforgiving than Eve, and still possible to land on and return from?

[Ultimate Steve]

Well, you can try to descend as far into a gas giant as possible and make it out alive.

I've only just started playing the whirligig pack. In that pack your homeworld is a super massive super spinny rock, which spun itself into basically a disc. Gravity is somewhere between 1 and 2g at the equator and over 6g at the poles. Orbital velocity is 8km/s but you're already going 4.5 at the equator due to the spin.

Taking off from the poles and reaching orbit would be really, really, really hard.

And no atmosphere to slow you down when you land.

EDIT: Whirligig has been updated, it's only 2.5km/s to Mesbin orbit now, but at the poles it's now 13g. Mesbin is, however, binary with Derbin, which is basically a mega-Eve, a way thicker atmosphere, with more gravity, and a higher orbital velocity.

Edited October 19, 2018 by Ultimate Steve

[Tyko]

Tellumo in GPP is a real challenge 10x atmospheric density coupled with 1.9x gravity is a killer. That's higher density and higher gravity ASL than EVE.

Edited October 5, 2018 by Tyko

[AeroGav]

1 hour ago, Tyko said:

Tellumo in GPP is a real challenge 10x atmospheric density coupled with 1.9x gravity is a killer. That's higher density and higher gravity ASL than EVE.

But, it has an oxygen atmosphere so you can run jet engines up to a certain altitude.    I did make a two stage spaceplane that got to orbit ,  it basically had panthers and rapiers mounted to fuel tanks on the wing tips, which it dropped when they flamed out.   The rest of the journey to orbit was via NERVs.     Lots of parts and things got very hot though.  For a stock rocket,  i can see why this would be murder.  

I've gotten out of Tellumo, but not escaped from Eve (with stock parts),  i suppose it depends whether you're talking rocket or space plane. 

[Vanamonde]

Modding question moved to the modding subforum. 

[Gordon Fecyk]

5 hours ago, AeroGav said:

I've gotten out of Tellumo, but not escaped from Eve (with stock parts)

There was a beautifully simple 36 t Eve lander that accomplished this feat with only three stages and a very careful ascent. And even then you could jetpack the rest of the way if you came up short.

Tellumo's a very different animal that teases you with its oxygen atmosphere and then stomps you with its gravity. Even with extended jet thrust curves, I've only managed to get to orbit in the stock Kerbal-X after strapping six Goliath engines to it as boosters.

[Klapaucius]

I've been downloading various planet packs and compiling a list of planets with atmospheres with a view to doing an on-again off-again series of very short flying video tours around alien worlds using Mission Builder. 

So, I have not tried landing or reaching orbit from any of these, but I have tried flying on some.  Here are some stats (note--I'm not 100% sure if comparisons are completely accurate. I think @OhioBob noted that gravity etc may be based on the home planet of a planet pack, so if the home planet is not a Kerbin equivalent, 1 atmosphere in one pack may not mean the same in others. Having said all that:

 

Planet Pack                       Planet                              Gravity             atmospheric pressure        atmospheric height     oxygen?

After Kerbin                       Reaper                               2.22298            5                                            90000                             no

Kerbol Origins                   Keelon                                2.7                    0.6                                           115000                         no

New Horizons                   Titanus                               2.4                     0.6                                          160000                          yes

Galileo                                 Tellumno                           1.9                    10                                            45000                           yes

                                             Eve (for comparison)        1.70058          5                                              90000                            no         

 

EDIT:  Turns out atmospheric values for planet packs cannot be reliably obtained from the tracking station.  So the values posted above are likely not correct. From personal experience, I can say that Titanus is almost certainly not correct, and that explains why it just felt wrong to have such maneuverability with only .6 asl.  Thanks @OhioBob for clarifying that.

 

REAPER (It's like a green Eve):

                

Edited October 15, 2018 by Klapaucius

[JadeOfMaar]

@Klapaucius I highly doubt those planets (Keelon and Titanus) really have 0.6 atm. If you only read their info panel in the Tracking Station you may have been lied to. Their body configs may be missing a key that tells the Tracking Station what value to show-- and that panel will default to 0.6. I found it out the easy way by reading the body config, and the hard way by flying in and watching the KER atmo data and getting caught with my pants down. I'd suggest getting the real values from those ASAP and update your table to not misinform others.

OhioBob is correct. The atmosphere pressure reading in the planet info panel is relative to that of the homeworld. I didn't hear about gravity from him.

Tellumo is more unforgiving than Eve but much more attracting to attempt to overcome it (or plan luxurious one-way missions ) by possessing Oxygen (and grass, and Water). In addition to the two points that it has greater gravity and greater sea level pressure than Eve, its atmosphere is also realistically very short, meaning its atmo pressure scales very sharply and may be worse to try to aerobrake in. And its one moon is of even less use to you than Gilly, or (iirc) Titanus' Tylo-like moon.

@AeroGav If you have a video of that I'd love to see it.

[Klapaucius]

2 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

@Klapaucius I highly doubt those planets (Keelon and Titanus) really have 0.6 atm. If you only read their info panel in the Tracking Station you may have been lied to. 

I had a feeling that was the case. Too much lift to be 0.6.  My plane was pulling insane loops on Titanus.

I don't know if the other stats are exact, but I can attest that Reaper is a difficult planet.  It's got the EVE thing going in spades.

[AeroGav]

12 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

AeroGav If you have a video of that I'd love to see it. 

Only these screenshots.  It's not very stable in yaw (not long fuselage, tail too small) and knowing what i know oow, I'd use Bg S strakes instead - more capacityy of fuel per mass and drag.

airbreathers still attached

getting on my nervs...

a bit hot at mach 13.  lost the small nose cone..   had to throttle back slightly at this point to avoid losing any more parts, but not too much or you don't make orbit.  procedural faring for mk2 i think

[OhioBob]

@Klapaucius, @JadeOfMaar is right, you have to be very suspicious of what you read in the Tracking Station regarding atmospheric pressure.  The best way to be certain that you've got the right pressure is to open the .cfg for the planet and find the pressureCurve.  It should look something like this:

		Atmosphere
		{
			pressureCurve
			{
				key = 0 101.325 0 -0.0150837
				key = 1000 87.2020 -0.0132081 -0.0132081
				key = 3000 63.9899 -0.0101333 -0.0101333
				key = 6000 38.9849 -0.00673315 -0.00673315
				key = 9000 22.6271 -0.00429191 -0.00429191
				key = 12000 12.5591 -0.00253586 -0.00253586
				key = 15000 6.81764 -0.00138393 -0.00138393
				key = 20000 2.54022 -0.000487144 -0.000487144
				key = 25000 0.998086 -0.000181456 -0.000181456
				key = 30000 0.412750 -7.07098E-05 -7.07098E-05
				key = 35000 0.180048 -2.89531E-05 -2.89531E-05
				key = 40000 0.0818694 -1.27710E-05 -1.27710E-05
				key = 45000 0.0370931 -6.02348E-06 -6.02348E-06
				key = 50000 0.0159849 -2.79241E-06 -2.79241E-06
				key = 55000 0.00644408 -1.21769E-06 -1.21769E-06
				key = 60000 0.00242266 -4.88645E-07 -4.88645E-07
				key = 63000 0.00131259 -2.70937E-07 -2.70937E-07
				key = 70000 0 0 0
			}
		}

The first number in each key is the altitude in meters, and the second number is the pressure in kilopascals.  So in the example above, the pressure at an altitude of zero is 101.325 kPa, which is 1 Kerbin atmosphere.

The pressureCurve is what you actually get in the game, so it's the planet's real atmospheric pressure.  What the Tracking Station displays is the setting staticPressureASL.  If staticPressureASL is not assigned a value, then the value of the template will be used.  It's likely that some of these planets are using a Laythe template, so that's why they're showing 0.6 atm.

And as JadeOfMaar said, the pressure is always relative to the home world.  That is, the Tracking Station will always show the home world's atmospheric pressure as 1 atm regardless of what it is in kPa.  So even if another planet's pressure is correctly displayed as 0.6 atm, that only means that it has 60% of the home world's pressure.

The surface gravity displayed in the Tracking Station should be correct.  That is, 1g always equals 9.80665 m/s².

 

Edited October 15, 2018 by OhioBob

[Klapaucius]

25 minutes ago, OhioBob said:

And as JadeOfMaar said, the pressure is always relative to the home world.  That is, the Tracking Station will always show the home world's atmospheric pressure as 1 atm regardless of what it is in kPa.  So even if another planet's pressure is correctly displayed as 0.6 atm, that only means that it has 60% of the home world's pressure.

The surface gravity displayed in the Tracking Station should be correct.  That is, 1g always equals 9.80665 m/s².

 

I figured that was the case. I did put a caveat in my original post, and I have edited it and put it in red ink . 

 

So, out of curiosity, any idea why pressure is based off the home planet gravity is not?  One would think it would be all one way or all the other....

I'm assuming as well that other stats in the tracking station (such as length of day) are like gravity and derived from a set value, or is that also contingent on the home planet?  Thanks for the clarification!

Edited October 15, 2018 by Klapaucius

[KerikBalm]

With Kopernicus, its easy to make your own packs.

My Eve is 3x the radius with 10x atmospheric pressure (only 1.2 G though), no O2 atmosphere... its really hard....

[Sharpy]

The idea is that 1 Atmosphere is the unit of pressure basing on atmospheric pressure in normal human homeworld (Earth) conditions at human homeworld average sea level. (meanwhile Pascal is Newton/meter^2 which is based on universal quantities).

Not sure why g  wouldn't follow the same rules; it is kinda inconsistent - it's gravitational acceleration on Earth. I guess one reason might be because specific impulse is closely tied to it and so your engines would all have a different specific impulse depending on the mass of your homeworld. (g is used as the conversion factor between mass (kg) and weight (N); specific impulse in seconds is the time an engine can fire producing thrust equal to weight of fuel used up in that time in Earth gravity.)

[OhioBob]

10 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

I figured that was the case. I did put a caveat in my original post, and I have edited it and put it in red ink . 

You can look up what the atmospheric pressures of those worlds actually are just by checking they're cfg files.  I can comfirm that Tellumo's pressure is indeed 1013.25 kPa, i.e. 10 Kerbin atmospheres.
 

10 hours ago, Klapaucius said:

So, out of curiosity, any idea why pressure is based off the home planet gravity is not?  One would think it would be all one way or all the other....

I'm assuming as well that other stats in the tracking station (such as length of day) are like gravity and derived from a set value, or is that also contingent on the home planet?  Thanks for the clarification!

I think @Sharpy has it right.

 

 

 

[Gordon Fecyk]

On ‎10‎/‎15‎/‎2018 at 5:02 AM, Sharpy said:

I guess one reason might be because specific impulse is closely tied to [Earth's gravity] and so your engines would all have a different specific impulse depending on the mass of your homeworld.

That's a story about unit conversion, actually. Scott Manley explains things best. The summary is rocket efficiency is actually expressed in terms of the exhaust velocity, but European and American teams used different units to express this: metres per second vs feet per second. Somehow they agreed (on something?! Wow! </sarcasm>) on the idea of using Earth's surface gravity as a conversion factor. 32 feet/second² or 9.81 metres/second² and some math later, you'd end up with a value in seconds.

And at least everyone could agree on what a second was.

Perhaps Squad could just use a hard-coded value of 101.3 kPa for calculating atmospheric thrust and exhaust velocity, just like they do for calculating specific impulse in a vacuum. That's essentially what we're doing on Kopernicus home worlds when we specify a staticPressureASL that has no correlation with pressureCurve.

<rant>I thought American rocketeers got over this after seventy years.</rant>

Edited October 17, 2018 by Gordon Fecyk

[Klapaucius]

On 10/15/2018 at 5:14 PM, JadeOfMaar said:

@Klapaucius I highly doubt those planets (Keelon and Titanus) really have 0.6 atm. If you only read their info panel in the Tracking Station you may have been lied to. Their body configs may be missing a key that tells the Tracking Station what value to show-- and that panel will default to 0.6. I found it out the easy way by reading the body config, and the hard way by flying in and watching the KER atmo data and getting caught with my pants down. I'd suggest getting the real values from those ASAP and update your table to not misinform others.

OhioBob is correct. The atmosphere pressure reading in the planet info panel is relative to that of the homeworld. I didn't hear about gravity from him.

Tellumo is more unforgiving than Eve but much more attracting to attempt to overcome it (or plan luxurious one-way missions ) by possessing Oxygen (and grass, and Water). In addition to the two points that it has greater gravity and greater sea level pressure than Eve, its atmosphere is also realistically very short, meaning its atmo pressure scales very sharply and may be worse to try to aerobrake in. And its one moon is of even less use to you than Gilly, or (iirc) Titanus' Tylo-like moon.

@AeroGav If you have a video of that I'd love to see it.

So I looked at the CFG for Titanus. It reads:

key = 0 759.9375

So, just to clarify, I divide that by 101.325 (that being the ASL on Kerbin at 0 sea level)?

 

That would make Titanus 7.5 at sea level , Keelon (222.915) 2.2 and Reaper (506.625) 5.

 

Edited October 20, 2018 by Klapaucius

[JadeOfMaar]

@Klapaucius That's more like it.

[BRAAAP_STUTUTU]

i feel like tellumo would probably get a thousand times easier if we also had SCRAMjets (provided there would be spaceplane parts capable of not disintegrating at mach 5-10 lol

[JadeOfMaar]

13 hours ago, BRAAAP_STUTUTU said:

i feel like tellumo would probably get a thousand times easier if we also had SCRAMjets (provided there would be spaceplane parts capable of not disintegrating at mach 5-10 lol

Tellumo's not going to get that much easier once you have scramjet engines. Its gravity ensures that. You have to deal with everything weighing nearly twice what you're used to, the scramjets themselves and the extra LF for them being that much more dead weight while they can't work, and while they do work, how long it takes you to get good TWR out of them, and the peak operating envelope for them being thinner due to the atmosphere being shorter. But in spite of these new hurdles, scramjet trials are encouraged on Tellumo.

[Klapaucius]

32 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Tellumo's not going to get that much easier once you have scramjet engines. Its gravity ensures that. You have to deal with everything weighing nearly twice what you're used to, the scramjets themselves and the extra LF for them being that much more dead weight while they can't work, and while they do work, how long it takes you to get good TWR out of them, and the peak operating envelope for them being thinner due to the atmosphere being shorter. But in spite of these new hurdles, scramjet trials are encouraged on Tellumo.

Lift is no problem at sea level if you are using wings, since the air is so thick.    From spending a day flying around for my little airshow/planet pack travelogue, I can say that getting into the air is easy (and stunt flying is simply superb!).  As you gain altitude, the standard jet engines will propel you along just as well as on Kerbin. However, yes, since there is less atmosphere, you've got to get your climbing speed up to a very good clip while you can still breath.   I'll need to do some more trials, but so far, I find getting a plane in the air and flying with the 10x pressure easier than the 5x pressure of Eve.  Granted, I cannot fly jets on Eve, so I would really need to test the same rocket plane on both.

 

However, two things in particular make flying quite challenging:

1. As you noted, the atmosphere is shorter, so it gets rather thin at low altitudes which, coupled with the 1.9 gs makes taking off at any type of altitude very difficult.

2.  All the rocks and vegetation (including some wonderfully detailed underwater flora and coral) in Galileo's Planet Pack are hard. If you hit them, you destroy your aircraft, unlike the trees on Kerbin.  Couple that with the uneven terrain, and taking off and landing is a difficult anywhere but the shore.  

 

[BRAAAP_STUTUTU]

4 hours ago, JadeOfMaar said:

Tellumo's not going to get that much easier once you have scramjet engines. Its gravity ensures that. You have to deal with everything weighing nearly twice what you're used to, the scramjets themselves and the extra LF for them being that much more dead weight while they can't work, and while they do work, how long it takes you to get good TWR out of them, and the peak operating envelope for them being thinner due to the atmosphere being shorter. But in spite of these new hurdles, scramjet trials are encouraged on Tellumo.

while I'm currently doing a stock system + opm playthrough, i'll definitely try doing that next time i'm playing GPP

probably will use the BFR capsule/cargo pod from tundra exploration since it has insane heat capacity (8000/10000K!!!)

then using a mix of NFaeronotics project eeloo multimode nuclear engines and mk2 expansion scramjets (beats me why NFaero doesn't have SCRAMJETS), optimizing for drag is probably a given, good thing he thick atmosphere generates lots of lift