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What did you do in KSP1 today?


Xeldrak

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Mun Station is complete!

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The station houses 40 kerbals and features a telescope, science array with lab, docking array, docking tug, fuel depot, solar panels, antennae, a surface scanner, and four escape pods. Those four pods can only hold two kerbals each, because safety.

 

Here’s a spoiler containing some highlights from the final mission.

Spoiler

Ascent was pretty uneventful... except for the fact that my passengers were being consumed by a dark void in the cabin, and not to mention their seats were inside their heads.

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Once I rendezvoused with the station and was ready to EVA the kerbals, I realized I had no control over them and that I must dock the ship with the station. I realize now that I probably didn’t activate the RCS:/ Anyway, I used the tug as an adapter to dock the ship.

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Mission successful.

 

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1 hour ago, CatastrophicFailure said:

If the game lets you do it... it’s not cheating. -_-

Exactly. As far as I am concerned there is no cheating in KSP, no cheating in single player sandbox games. Unless of course you participate in a contest or something. If you want to pretend your kerbals discovered super fuel and play all your missions with infinite fuel from now on, I wont loose sleep over it at all. Anybody can play this game however he wants.

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Finally ... I have the DLC. A gift by @quitessa and @Yargnit who are awesome!

A few days ago I was watching a Twitch stream by @EJ_SA, who is awesome as well. He was trying to build a stock helicopter with a reduction gearbox but was unable to get it into the air. Fascinated by the encountered problems I started work on a gearbox which should be able to transfer the needed torque of the turbine to the secondary shaft and so I remembered the real world solutions. The strongest, most reliable way to do so is by using a epicylic gear train, also known as a planetary gearbox. I used no DLC parts on this one.

As is commonly known with anyone with experience building gears in KSP, there's a max rotational speed before the physics engines starts to skip frames and the tendency to slip or more commonly RUD. The solution was to simply reduce the speed of the engine. But to produce the required lift it has to be compensated at the other end.

One can either:

  1. increase blade length, which can cause flapping blades, lift reversal or kraken attacks,
  2. increase the amount of blades, which makes the helicopter harder to control due to gyroscopic precession and puts a larger strain on the bearings,
  3. increase blade angle, which limits forward motion due to the higher susceptibility to retreating blade stall, also there's a hard limit, above a certain angle lift drops and drag increases.

Eventually I chose 8 blades with a blade angle of 10 degrees, more lift than 5 and 15 degrees -  this is exceptionally high, my normal helicopters have an angle between 2 and 4 degrees and rarely use more than 3 blades. I could've fine-tuned the angle to 0.5 degrees increments but wanted quick & dirty results.

The epicylic transmission is a simple 2:1, this made it possible to easily double the amount of planetary gear if needed. The sun gear uses 16 "teeth", the planetary gears use 8 and the annulus uses 32. Also, since the arrangement is perfectly symmetrical, it means that the required torque would be evenly transferred through both or all four planetary gears and also stabilizes both the primary and secondary shaft.

With two Wheesley's and the already complex arrangement I wasn't able to produce enough lift. Me being me I decided to make it at least work and decided to put another rotor on there but with a 5 degree blade angle, this time a direct drive from the turbine. This solution looks a lot like the Kamov helicopters, with the big difference the secondary rotor runs at half the speed and produces half the lift.

This animation shows it hovering, on the left side you see the top, direct drive rotor lift values. I chose a 0.5 sec timestep so you could at least read the numbers - if the encoding didn't make it all too blurry.

And this animation shows the driven parts. Lots of RCS balls.

 

Now the big question: is it useful for anything else than a demo? I think not. The complexity, the physics limitations, part count, mass, size and drag makes sure it cannot compete with a direct drive at this time. And turboprops with gears will fly just as much as airplanes using piston engines - not at all.

Can it be improved upon? Probably ... but how much? Even if we double the efficiency of this design, we still have the problem of it not being a useful, controllable helicopter capable of speed or range.

But it is indeed very interesting experiment. This is the first flying stock helicopter using a reduction gearbox (that I know of), even if it doesn't carry the full load. Also my first planetary gearbox after my 2014 experiments using mods. I have the intention to finally build a working car transmission using this tech, something I have been dreaming about for the last 4 years.

 

I also made a tiny turboprop using DLC parts, inspired by the Merlin mounted on the Lancaster. It uses 9 Juno's and produces a mere 36kN static thrust. However, I've used every aerodynamic trick in the KSP book so with two or four of them it might be nice for a replica and produce a decent speed. Part count is pretty high for such a small thing: 58. I over-engineered the bearings so part count might drop to 40-ish. One can remove the dummy exhaust stacks. With tank empty it weighs 4.6t. At least it has variable prop pitch.

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This post might be interesting to other krakenheads/turboheads as well, I was thinking of @luizopiloto and @klond.

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10 hours ago, Kronus_Aerospace said:

Well, I don't see how using a glitch is equivalent to just straight up cheating. A lot of designs that people make exploit the physics and aerodynamics weirdnesses in the game.

I know, it just breaks the spirit of the game. Still, it is interesting. Hint: I have worked with these drives before. If they are light enough, they can work on Eve. Which means, infinite propulsion to anywhere with no fuel. Not very fun performing long burns though.

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13 hours ago, Kronus_Aerospace said:

Well, I don't see how using a glitch is equivalent to just straight up cheating. A lot of designs that people make exploit the physics and aerodynamics weirdnesses in the game.

Moreover unlike theirs, your exploit is hilarious! I had no idea at all that was possible. Is this new? I thought the days of Kraken Drive and Infiniglide were over. Anyway, so long as you're not trying to cheat on a challenge with it, I see no reason why anybody should see fit to throw shade. I do have one suggestion though: Can we call it the Von Muenchausen Drive instead? "Ladder Drive" is a bit prosaic for something so funny!

Edited by herbal space program
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5 hours ago, Spacetraindriver said:

Time to play guess the aircraft! In this round it isn't an aircraft! Or, at least isn't supposed to be...

 

2 hours ago, dangerhamster said:

Blimey, an Ekranoplan exceeding deign parameters.

Specifically the Soviet Lun-class. :D Basically a high-speed missile platform. 

1 hour ago, herbal space program said:

Is this new?

Been around a while, kinda comes and goes in terms of recognition. Was eclipsed by Kraken drives for a while. 

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30 minutes ago, papuchalk said:

Going to send landing probe on Laythe, then set-up satellite around Pol, and the rest of the ship will serve as Jool relay communication satellite. All in one ship

Sounds like with a bit of work, you could have a Jool-5 ship!

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So after a weekend of flying rubberducks from Hong Kong tourists in and out of space for mucho muneys, we are finaly back at our nemesis: Mount Doom.

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We will now wait for sunrise to fully recharch our batts and then we will be on our way, again...

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Funny enough we've got a other contract to do seismic readings near a previous buggy that was up there....great <_<

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Edited by Triop
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