Cirocco

Just thought i'd let you guys know. for those that aren't aware yet: tomorrow on januari 6 at 6:20 EST (which is 11:20 GMT) SpaceX will launch a resupply mission to the ISS. What makes this mission special is that for the first time ever, spaceX will try to fully recover the launch stage in order to re-furbish and re-use it. They plan to do this by having it perform re-entry and a powered landing on a sea-going floating platform. It's just a first-time full-scale test and the odds of success are estimated to be below 50%, but still. If this works the consequences for cheaper spaceflight could be HUGE. The launch will be broadcast be NASA tv as usual, dunno if they'll be covering the recovery as well. fingers crossed guys

On the whole "black side down" thing: I'm a quality engineer (not in aerospace though, I work in pharmaceuticals) and you'd be amazed how often these little things cause giant problems. Writing "not this knee" on a patient's leg may seem really silly, but it has prevented several extremely costly errors for almost no cost. these small things seem stupid, but it's a reality that such things occur, especially in an environment where you have a lot of different people doing different jobs working together. Not everyone knows what impact their job can have. Preventing costly errors with minimal effort is the key to making high-quality products. And in a sector where you simply cannot afford any errors like aerospace such things are immeasurably important. Of course, exactly because these things seem silly, cost little (but extra) effort and because the effects aren't noticed until something goes catastrophically wrong, it is extremely hard to consistently get everyone to do them every time. Such is the curse of the quality department.

I did a runway-duna surface-runway in an SSTO spaceplane without refuel a while ago. Here's what I learned about landing on Duna: - No oxygen so rocket engines are required. I went with nuclear engines because my spaceplane was big and heavy and I used those for interplanetary transit as well, but if you go light then other engines are of course viable as well. I'm not sure about ion engines because they have a REALLY low thrust and gravity losses may be too high, but I've never tried so it might work. - easiest way is to do a tailsitter with chutes and a suicide burn at the last second to slow you down so you don't break your engine bells on impact. You can tip it over if you want to do a horizontal take-off. Low gravity and high impact tolerance on landing gear means you probably won't break anything tipping over. This obviously isn't that different from a "conventional" powered landing. if you want to go for a horizontal landing: - get a TON of lift on you spaceplane. Seriously, whatever you think is enough, double it. More lift means less horizontal speed required to reduce vertical speed. For reference: a plane that does 80 m/s horizontal speed on a safe landing on the runway on Kerbin likely will need to do at least 200-300 m/s on Duna to get the same vertical speed, which obviously is NOT a safe landing speed. I usually take 100-120 m/s horizontal and 5-10 m/s vertical speed as a reference for "safe" landings. (actually 10 m/s vertical is already a bit much and be aware that if you land on an upwards going slope, the impact will be much harder than what the vertical speed would lead you to believe) - landing site matters! pick a low landing site. Anything under 3000 meters means a lot thicker atmosphere, which means more lift which will make your life TONS easier. When I did a horizontal landing I went with the flats that are located on the equator next to the large canyon. Landing on the equator also means you can save a couple of hundred delta-V in getting to orbit if you take off facing 90° on the navball. - wingtip gears! Gears on the wingtips means you will be much less likely to clip the ground with your undoubtedly large wings and horribly crash and die. - protect against tailstrikes. Because of the uneven terrain, tailstrikes are very much a real threat. Usually a few gears near the back will be enough, but be aware that this will make take-off from Kerbin harder. On Duna the low gravity and the large amount of hills means they probably won't be a real problem on take-off. that's about all that jumps to mind. Hope it helps!

yeeeeaaaaaaah... if you want to land horizontally on Duna, double your lift rating. And then you'll probably have to add some more. Also, find a nice and low patch of ground to take maximum advantage of the atmosphere. And put wheels on the wingtips to prevent the bouncing from killing you. speaking from experience: landing horizontally on Duna is HARD. The reduced gravity really does not compensate for the thin atmosphere at ALL.

according to wikipedia, Saudi Arabia is a part of west-asia I personally am a European.

Probably mun missions. Like ranbowtrout said: they're easy enough to be pretty much routine and they still give you that low-gravity out-of-this-world experience. And if anything goes wrong, hell you have a launch window every couple of hours. Rescue missions to Mun are easy. I should really get to doing Jool missions though. Everybody always says it's awesome there, but sending out my kerbals so far out just scares the crap out of me. I don't want my little guys to die if anything goes wrong

Well re-usable SSTO spaceplanes save you money in the fact that you don't discard hardware. Fuel cost is peanuts compared to part cost. That means that, yes, re-usable SSTO spaceplanes don't offer much outside of kerbin's SOI. But they do help in getting stuff into space, which is where about half of your ship's energy goes to anyways. If you can get to orbit cheaper, that helps a TON in reducing costs. Of course, it's been mentioned many, many, many times before that in the current economics system SSTO spaceplanes indeed don't give that much advantage over disposable rocket systems because the game throws tons of money your way. Still, there's just something intensely satisfying about flying and designing SSTO spaceplanes. A while ago I was working on desiging a plane with multiple large cargo bays, but the enormous center of mass shifts that come with that were playing merry hell with my design plans. Sure I could just make a smaller plane and do several trips or strap my sattelite payloads to a big rocket and launch em all that way, but it's just a lot of fun trying to come up with creative solutions to the large cargo bay problem. Mind you now that the new MkIII parts have been announced, I scrapped the project and am just waiting for the new, bigger cargo bays

I've done runway-Duna surface-runway with a 3-man SSTO spaceplane without refuel (no cargo though). There's quite a few things that I learned while doing that project that I can tell you, what exactly do you need help with? Also, feel free to send me a message over the forums for concrete advice/tips/questions, that's probably a bit more structured and easier for the both of us link to mission report of the Duna Mission: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/83711-To-Duna-and-back%21-in-a-spaceplane%21-without-refuel%21?highlight=duna+back+spaceplane+refuel All stock by the way, both the plane and the aerodynamics. note that that one was made in I think 0.24 and I've learned a few additional spaceplane tricks since then. Coupled with the new parts, I'm sure I could make a better, more efficient one today. I just can't be arsed to do so before the new MkIII parts come out First and I believe most important tip of all: the order of placement of you engines and air intakes matters. Placing about 2 intakes per engine in the correct order is a lot more efficient than spamming dozens of them. And it looks a lot sleeker as well. The placement order you want is to first place any air intakes you want a particular engine to use, then place the engine, then place the intakes for the next engine, then place that engine, etc. DO NOT use the symmetry tool. If you use the above described method, you can eacily go up to 32-34ish km before you need to switch to rocket engines (you'll experience turbulence and will temperarily need to throttle down at about 27km) . This also means you can do circularization purely on atomic engines which will increase your ship's range by several orders of magnitude. Also, never go with more than 3 atomic engines. If you need more thrust then that, you're doing something wrong.

okay, my two cents. to see wether or not calculating delta-V by hand is hard, we first need to define what "hard" is. Personally, I go by the definition that if it is not easy to correctly and repeatedly attain the desired result, then something is hard. Note that this is very different from something being complex. If doing something involves a task that is extremely simple, but needs to be executed a very large amount of times with a 100% accuracy and no room for error, then the overall task is very hard even though it is made up of extremely simple parts (humans very easily make mistakes when performing repetitive tasks). That is I think the case with calculating delta-V. As slashy stated before, it's not super complex: once you have your input data, it's just one logarithmic function and a couple of very simple calculations. Thing is, in order to get the desired input data (wet mass, dry mass, etc), you need to do a LOT of addition of different parts of your ship. That is a very tedious task in which it is extremely easy to make a mistake (I speak from experience. My first Eve return vehicle designs were laughably underpowered because I forgot to add the mass of a part here or there on the final ascent stage). Add to that the complexity that comes in when you start using asparagus or some other more intricate staging, and it becomes (in my experience) best left to mechjeb/KER/other software because said software will do all these calculations for you without error. And of course once you go into an atmosphere, delta-V calculations get very complex very quickly. We're talking differential equations if you want to be accurate over a full ascent profile in atmosphere. in short: are Delta-V calculations too complex to do by hand? Not if you got the hang of it and have all the needed input data. Is it difficult to reliably achieve a high degree of accuracy when done by hand? Yeah, pretty much. As with all things in this game: play however you prefer and don't feel a single bit bad if other people do it differently.

As stated before, these laws can be applied a just about any project management, not just in the space industry. I'm not an aeonautical/space engineer, but I do work in a sector where quality is of the utmost, sometimes even vital importance. personal favorite is number 6. (Mar's Law) Everything is linear if plotted log-log with a fat magic marker. I have one side note with number 13 "Design is based on requirements. There's no justification for designing something one bit "better" than the requirements dictate." While you definitely should design something according to the customers wishes and not in any other way, when it comes to safety margins I find that the following law applies: always take at least 50% more margin (100 to 200% preferred) than should be required, but don't actually tell the customer this. Customers will push equipment to its qualification limits, make sure you are absolutely certain the equipment can handle it. This mostly because of the fact that there will always be unforeseen problems/quality issues/weaknesses in your equipment (another law!) and because of law 33: if you screw it up, people die.

totally and utterly boned. I almost always fly my missions start to completion in one single go (don't have kerbal alarm clock and I don't want to miss any launch windows), so the amount of kerbals in space at any time is almost always 0. Stuff that stays up for extended period of time is almost always automated.

Holy s*** that thing is pretty. Mental note: use that design idea for when I send my own SSTO to laythe. Though I might just wait for 0.90 to hit and do an SSTLaythe with the new MkIII parts, not sure yet.

Haha, awesome. Did you want to land a launch stage on a barge before SpaceX does it?

Ooooh, I didn't know KER had a readout for orbital period. Awesome, guess that solves that problem. Thanks again for the input guys

That was the idea, yes. They'd just be small comm sattelites. Okay, got a lot of good info, thanks guys. I should be able to get a good constellation with this. Now I just need to figure out the easiest/quickest way to find/calculate the orbital period of my orbits.

Hello all, i've been thinking of messing around with remotetech or antennarange or something similar, and i'd like to know how you can set up a proper geostationary constellation. By proper, I basically mean evenly spaced out sattelites on the same orbital height. So what's the trick to doing this? if I have say 4 sattelites and I would like to deploy them in such a manner that I'll have them form a square on geostationary orbit, how do I do that? In essence I guess I'd just have to get to orbit, release sattelite, burn prograde with mothership and make sure that the orbit of the mothership takes 1/4 times longer than the orbit of the deployed sattelite. But how can I calculate this or even get the data I need to calculate it? thanks in advance God I always feel like such a noob when asking this sort of stuff. I'm an engineer, I should bloody well know these things...

I have made a helpful chart to act as a visual aid in my thoughts on these kind of matters: Are you having fun doing X ? ---------yes----------> X is not a "wrong" way of playing the game | | No | | v X may be a wrong way of playing the game

Oooooooohhhhh those parts look SWEET! I love the things introduced with the MkII parts, but the lack of MkII to size large adaptors always bugged me, as well as the lack of a good 3-man cockpit (in my saves, unless I need to drastically save weight, Bill Bob and Jeb go on missions together or not at all) Those new adapters look AWESOME! And they'll allow for use of spaceplane parts in rocket construciton too! Can't wait for this stuff. My interest in KSP has waned a little over the past weeks/months, but this stuff looks absolutely amazing.

I personally don't do much real TSTO's, but I occasionally enjoy making spaceplanes with RATO (Rocket Assisted Take-Off). Read: strap SRB's under the wings, make sure the plane has sufficient control surfaces/torque to compensate and blast off! There's just something intensely satisfying about seeing a super-heavy interplanetary spaceplane blast off with less of a third of the runway used. It's technically two stages, but I usually ditch the SRB's within the first 20 or so seconds of flight. In fact, in one of my iterations I strapped a chute on each SRB, set the chutes to deploy at minimum altitude (50m) and the boosters actually hit the water past the KSC before leaving the physics bubble. Full recovery, even with a stage )

Thanks guys, there's some good info in here! I never thought about using gravity assists to straighten out orbits or getting them inclined to a certain degree. Makes sense though, this could certainly help in things like a Moho return mission. keep it up, I love reading about people's (possibly unplanned) gravity assists

With the recent attention to the rosetta mission, I got to wondering: how often do KSP players use gravity assists? I personally don't really use gravity assists because I rarely do multiple-body missions (except between planets and their moons, but I've never been to Jool either...). I did once use the Mun to gravity brake an asteroid in a stable orbit around kerbin, but that was completely unplanned and very, very lucky. I plan to use a gravity assist from jool when I decide to finally run a mission to send a prode out to interstellar space, but other then that, I don't really use any planned assists. I imagine that most gravity assists would be used in the Jool system, using things like Tylo for a braking or slingshot assist, but I don't really know for sure. So, do share ! Do you use gravity assists in KSP? If so, how often and in which missions? Do you manage multiple assists? If you use them, how do you calculate them, etc.

And this is why I haven't disabled the save/load function in my career saves... you have my sympathies friend.

that looks awesome I salute you sir.

100% all day every day. occasionally I might put thrust limiter on my SRB's, but when launching, you floor the throttle. These ARE kerbals after all.

quite nice I have a question though: how did you get the interplanetary stage in orbit? seperate launches and orbital construction with docking ports or straight up single launch? And did you use re-usable craft for that as well? okay so that was more than just one question