costermonger

These are seriously fun, thank you! First project was an minimalist air-dropped test drone; took me a while to nail the drop speed and alt, but the second time I got the damn things lit I hit 2,500 m/s on my way to an Ap halfway to the Mun. I think I shall enjoy these.

I've watched it in fascination like 20 times now. Lurking here all day was worth it, I guess.

The way I teach it is that the banked condition redirects some lift and causes the slip as described, but the weather-vane effect of the vertical stabilizer is what actually causes the yaw. From my relatively limited time flying aeroplanes in KSP, it seems like it doesn't quite compute the physics for turns the way it should (mainly the slip and resulting yaw), but an exaggerated version of the real life control inputs (mainly, more rudder) does the job.

Hah! It was definitely one of the examples I was thinking of. Their version of "something else" was to extend the rear landing gear & outboard spoilers. There are also neat solutions like this aircraft: They managed to retain directional stability by washing out the wingtips enough that they basically don't produce lift (just drag) and since they're behind the CoM, job done.

Pretty much. And that structure/forward mounted rudder would actually work against the vertical stabilizer, necessitating a larger stabilizer, resulting in more drag (real world, can't speak to KSP) and heavier structure.

It's all about directional stability. A vertical stabilizer (note: only the moving bit is called a rudder, and it's less important than the stabilizer) is tasked with keeping the aircraft pointed in the same general direction it is traveling. It does so by creating copious amounts of drag if it is no longer aligned with the direction of flight: This aircraft is in what's called a sideslip, in that it's traveling through the air in a different direction than it is pointed. In this case, the aircraft is traveling to the left of where it's nose is pointed. Since the vertical stabilizer now has angle of attack, it generates a force pushing the tail to the right, and aligning the aircraft more or less back into the relative airflow, when the vertical stabilizer will go back to 0° angle of attack and revert back to it's fairly low-drag condition of doing nothing in particular. The rudder is needed to fine tune this, but the majority of the work is done by the vertical stab. If the vertical stablizer was in front of the CoM, it wouldn't be a stabilizer - as soon as you enter that slipping condition the aircraft would actually deviate by a greater amount. That's negative stability. You don't really *need* a vertical stabilizer, but it sure does help (swept wings can do the job too). Or at least having something to keep the pointy end pointed forward.

I usually build a single stage lander (for low gravity moons anyway) but I've taken to placing my lander on top of a compact, high TWR/low dV stage that acts as an LES if needed, and if everything goes well it's got enough dV to perform some (or all, if at Minmus) of the de-orbit burn for landing. The KW solid rocket ullage motors are perfect for this. I usually aim for the LES stage to have a TWR rating 1.0+ higher than the highest generated by the lower stages, and seem to get 200-300 dV.

My only 'real mission' Kerbal casualties were all on EVA.

Yesterday I was building an interplanetary ship that requires 5 launches to lift, assemble and crew. I discovered after 3 launches that I had made a design mistake, but because of the unwieldy nature of the parts, this had taken hours already.. So I downloaded hyperedit.

I used to have a lot of issues with performance (then I found Active Texture Management and I got better) so my fuel depots were pretty minimalistic; a control unit with probe core, SAS, battery and some solar panels, then a tank body with (usually) a jumbo 64 and RCS. 4 docking ports total. That kept the partcount down a bit so my 200-part monstrosity ship or whatever didn't turn my computer into a pile of goo as I get within physics range.

Successfully? I've put multiple landers into the canyon just off the east farside crater on the moon, which is really steep. Flat floor though, which is why I've used it. Unsuccessfully.. My first ever landing attempt on anything was on Minmus, and I wasn't aware just how steep the terrain is when you get away from the flats. That didn't go well.

Haha, the Mriya just wasn't quite ridiculous enough and somebody had to photoshop four more engines onto the thing?

I fly planes for a living. I use the autopilot because it can often outperform me in terms of precision, but it needs to be set up properly in the first place and sometimes they don't behave, so you've got to be ready jump in. That entirely describes mechjeb as well.

I inevitably end up restarting in career mode with a different selection of mods. My current crop is rather large so I'm not exactly having a rough time gathering science, but it's fun to tackle the same problems with new parts & limitations.

Yes, but you can't do those things and also actually get there in a Hohmann transfer. KSP's version of physics requires us to exceed the escape velocity of a body in order to get an orbital transfer to said body's SOI, and we enter the SOI on a hyperbolic orbit every time. To turn it into an parabolic or circular orbit, we need to expend dV to get below escape velocity. IF you hit the SOI right at it's outer limit at a speed just above escape velocity, you can create a circular orbit for very little dV expenditure. I think you were probably doing this and KSP made a rounding error. In the real world, SOI isn't a thing and the dV 'nudge' needed to turn a hyperbolic orbit into a parabolic or circular (ie, captured orbit) can be provided by another planet or moon. KSP doesn't render this at all.

FTmN Atomic Rockets. That tordial tank is probably my most frequently used component in KSP. It's just too useful.

Built a three stage launcher/transfer system to push 70 tons out to Dres. Haven't got a 70 ton thing to send to Dres, but.. Y'know. That's next.

I figured as much. Thanks

I don't have any pictures of it but I built a whole armada of probes to send out to various planets and then launched them all into 100x100 orbits. I staggered all the launches so that although each vehicle was in the same orbit, they were all well spaced out. The second stage of the launcher had roughly 300m/s left in the tanks after getting to that parking orbit, so when the transfer windows opened, the first stage was pretty much enough to create an elliptical Kerbin orbit before jettison and continuing with the transfer stage. I hadn't considered that this would place those spent boosters in an orbit with a pe of ~100km but different orbital period, so the intersect processes with time. One of the last probes to depart came within 2km of a sister probe's spent booster (albeit with very little closing speed). Made me wonder what happens if a non-active ship collides with debris. That parking orbit was just full o' stuff, and there were 12 spent boosters all sliding in and out of it.

Lithobraking.

Hah. 8 month old boy in my case. MJ + autostage + move the keyboard is key for me.

I was playing around with Stretchy SRB last night and at the end of the first stage burn the TWR passed 25. The probe I was launching was still suborbital, but had an AP above 300k after the first stage. I'm going to play around with it a bit to work out a heavy lifter SRB-based SSTO design. Yes, it's basically cheating, but launching stuff gets kind of monotonous after a while.

My 8 month old seems to enjoy smacking the space bar (and triggering staging) while I play.

Getting docking figured out was probably the hardest thing for me in KSP. I used a couple tutorials, finally nailed it, and then practiced it over and over for a while (building a station as I went). After I'd done it about a dozen times I was sending up orange tanks with docking ports on each end and not much else, getting an encounter within ~10km using the circularizing engine and then taking a couple of my symmetrical monoprop tugs out from the station, docking one to each end of the tank and returning them to the station for attachment. Once you get it, you get it. Docking port alignment mods make the last 5 minutes of the process much, much less frustrating.

In an old mod-using career save of mine I built an SRB-assisted heavy launcher that taught me that too much TWR really is a bad thing with solid motors. I used it to launch a couple light probes (mostly because the launcher was really effective - with heavier payloads, that is) and hit a TWR over 10 by the end of the SRB burn. First time I saw the re-entry effects for a significant portion of the departure. Not easy to hit a precise parking orbit with that kind of thrust.