mstachowsky

Bravo. A read I started seven years ago and haven't forgotten about since. Well done, and thank you.

Weirdly enough I stopped getting notified of replies, and I'm almost never on KSP forums anymore except to read this, so I'm replying and selecting "notify me" just to make sure I get the new chapters!

Yes, that helped a lot. Thanks!

It has been so very long since this started that I'm starting to forget things. I think at one point someone made a map of all of the countries over a map of Kerbin. Does that exist? Can it be re-posted? It would also be *swell* if someone could explain a few things: 1. Who (whom?) is at war with who(m)? 2. Which country is the KSC in? 3. Who are the aggressors in each conflict? (That is, who started it?)

It has been many months since I last played KSP, and probably many years since I last signed in to the forums. I started reading this story probably somewhere in 2013 (I think, although I could be wrong if it is not that old, sorry!). I at least remember that I read it on a tablet I owned about four generations of broken tablets ago, so it was a while. I have been getting periodic email updates and have enjoyed thinking about the story between chapter releases. Please keep going. I know there are a lot of us here who aren't posting after each chapter, but I'm definitely waiting for each new one to come out.

This is still great! I'm just replying so that I can get notifications, since I don't know how to set that up yet :-P

Hm, I might be missing something, but I got an email saying there was a new post (with new pictures and everything) but it doesn't show up here. Is there anything new?

I really enjoyed these and just read them all in 2 days. More please!

This one is neat. Are you doing all the artwork?

This is awesome, keep it up!

I'm trying to design a lander/plane for an Eve surface return mission. My goal is to use the smallest possible plane to do this. Since I'll have to rely on rocket thrust to get the plane into the atmosphere, it would be grand if I could do the following: 1) Land without using any fuel 2) Take off using tiny engines, say two 30KN thrust ones, with as small a fuel tank as I can for each 3) Use the wings of the plane to get me *as high into the atmosphere as possible* using those two engines 4) Once the apogee (apoeve?) is reached in my suborbital atmospheric flight, drop the wings and ignite the second stage to do the large majority of the orbital insertion 5) If this is still impossible, I'll probably make the final stage an ion powered, very light booster that can get to orbit. I feel that this task should be possible with a very small spaceplane, rather than the "MOAR FUEL" rockets I've seen for most Eve return missions. I want to know how to compute the delta-v to orbit from a given height in Eve's atmosphere, so that I can figure out the best design to use. It's a big trade-off between the first stage, powered by rockets whose sole purpose is to get my high into the atmosphere, and the final stage, which needs to be orbital. Any thoughts? Does anyone think my idea is possible?

I've experimented using parachutes for landing before, it was pretty good for sure. I've gotten fairly decent at getting my landings working now, and mainly I land on large, flat areas. I think, though, that with my newfound understanding for the strength of the landing gear, I can hit some fairly steep slopes and still be OK. MIKE

There is when you overshoot your landing site by 5km with a big fuel tanker, especially on non-flat ground where you aren't sure if there will BE a landing site in 5km :-P

Huh, yeah I just tested all of this out. I landed a plane (on the runway...) at 75m/s on the speed indicator but 5m/s ishly on the vertical speed indicator and I was perfectly fine. I have been landing WAY too carefully the WHOLE TIME I've been playing KSP :-P This explains why I always overshoot my landings by a few km by trying to keep my speed indicator under 50. Huh, this will definitely change how I play...Thanks everyone!

Interesting. How do you mean "the rest of the aircraft may not"? Is it possible to land at, say, 49m/s vertical and the rest of the plane blows up? (that would be awkward...) Does the horizontal speed factor into anything?

I'm wondering if the 50m/s crash tolerance means "50m/s straight down" or just "speed of 50m/s". I'm betting it's the latter, since I've landed at 54-60m/s a few times but was going very slowly down and nothing was wrong. I ask because I'm about to send a refueling tanker SSTO to Laythe and don't want to find out on landing that I can't get an extra 5 m/s out of it. Any thoughts? MIKE

No mods on my system. I suspect it's a bad download. Every time I run the patcher it stops at 94% telling me it's all fine, but still the bugs...

I love the newcarm pack but im noticing more bugs than I ever did before. I had a ship explode, kraken style, even though it was a new ship to my save. Ive had asteroids disappear while I was closing in within 1km. I had an old (pre arm update) ship blow itself apart at launch and then at a second try at launch the engine stopped for no reason and I couldnt do any control at all. My game is totally unmodded and the lost control ship had plenty of power and resoyrces. any thoughts? Is this only happening because its an old save I reloaded with the arm pack?

Yeah, I agree about the concept that the acceleration should increase, but I noticed a marked increase in acceleration as soon as the red stuff showed up: the acceleration went from the green into the red on the navball display and the speed increased dramatically.

This might get posted twice so sorry about that: 1) The re-entry heating animation shows up even if you're going up or down, as long as you're going fast enough. What I found was, with the small srb, the rocket would accelerate upwards once the red animation showed up with significantly more acceleration than the rocket engine normally provided. the rocket had not burned out by the time the red animation showed up. 2) Is there a stress calculation that goes on with regards to airspeed? Maybe the nose cones reduce the drag and therefore the stress? 3) Is anyone interested in replicating my results to see if it's not just my setup? I'm using the vanilla version and did not physics warp.

This is why I was confused. The rocket was still burning and going up when the red re-entry animation showed up and the acceleration increased significantly, *upwards*. Every time I launched the small srb without the cone it blew up before getting to the red re-entry animation. When I had the cone on, it didn't. I'm using an unmodded version. Does anyone want to confirm or deny my results?

So I was playing around with nose cones today and I learned that they do *something*, but I'm still not sure what. Here's what I did: I launched a small SRB with only a probe body, turned SAS off, and watched. Once it started to break the sound barrier it blew up. When I put a nose cone on, it didn't and kept on going until burn out. So somehow the nose cone was able to negate the pressure of the atmosphere. Another very weird thing, although this may be some kind of physics I don't know, was that once the red "re-entry" animation showed up (it was going VERY fast), it started to accelerate and *increase* its speed. I would have expected it to decrease speed due to increased air resistance. Tests with the large SRB show the same thing happening. On the other hand, fins seem to do very little. fins are supposed to stabilize a rocket, but I found that they didn't really - the SRBs veered off course just a little bit in the same way regardless of whether or not I had fins on the rocket. Any thoughts on why this is? MIKE