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I was expecting to power up at least 2 drills with 4 gigantors, but they give me a meagre 4U with 100 exposure. This is not the way it works at Kerbin poles. And exposure does not work like that anywhere else afaik. Just to expand a little bit the concept: the energy you can gather using the same OX STAT on Kerbin near a random pole is more or less equal to the amount you could gather on KSC landing strip at dawn. That amount is more or less halved compared to the energy you can gather at noon. With a comparable exposure (85-95) and as close as possible to sea level (max 75m altitude) the energy gathered is as follows: Kerbin pole - 0.05/0.08 KSC dawn - 0.05/0.08 KSC noon - 0.18/0.22 Eve north pole - 0.00/0.01 Eve equatorial region dawn - 0.00/0.01 Eve e.r. noon - 0.01/0.03 If you make RTGs to explode down there you should provide an reliable and feasible alternative, it might not be comfortable to bring down there a single seat rover propelled by a random number of gigantors. I was not particularly happy with the RTG solution myself so I thought to model a kind of ram air turbine to propel the rovers but that is still WIP.

That is the north pole, so this is almost the best exposure you can have.

Well, yes they do but they are not a reliable power source there. Without an RTG I am more often standing still than moving.

I heard it was 225W. So being arbitrary, and since I tried to make the same conversion I thought that New Horizons got 2 RTGs (provided they did not clip anything) for 225 that gives us a raw calculation of 112.5 per. In KSP a single RTG can provide 45U per minute, so here you are with your arbitrary power U value. BTW, I had this idea because I wanted to model a ram air turbine and an average one produces 400W that I did not know how to compare to kerbal power units.

It is not such a classified design, it is just that I don't feel it is ready to go public However I made a few closeups in the SPH with some infos about the design you can find below. If there is anything more specific you are curious about just send me a PM.

It seems like the future holds a few surprises for the dogfight as we know it. At this link you can find a few examples of the UAVs currently in development (well, tbh there are many more like nEUROn) and here an interesting analysis that pits these UAVs against supercruising 5th generation fighters like Raptors and PAK-FAs.

That would be cool, but solar panels are already limited on Eve's surface (you can gather something less than 200U of energy with a couple of small OX-STATs with a good exposure for a whole day well above 2000m). They are practically not working at sea level. This would leave just fuel cells as a reliable power source.

Thank you guys. I appreciate.

The diamond setup works wonders to me. I think this is going to be a very fun race.

Nice to hear you found it helpful. I had a try with Mk3 parts but my design was pretty ugly and scarcely functional. I am looking forward the next stock wheels upgrade to try again. If you are looking to have extra fun you might want to try a real banking one with a short wheelbase to simulate the bike feeling. The "bike" in the pics got just a few d/v less than the "car".

I have a few ideas but to be honest I do not really know why. My prime suspect is that I do not use angle snap for wheels, but I could be wrong. In case of flipping you just need to open the cargo bay to get back on your wheels.

On Kerbin, following a pic of my 8t model, it is capable of more than 25m/s on rough flat terrain. It can turn 360° at full throttle. It fits in an Mk3 bay (alas my Mk3 SSTO does not work as intended yet). It is capable of autonomous landing (and back to orbit) on Mun. Back in 0.90 it was a lot beefier, I miss it sometimes Sorry if I did brag a few, this rover is one of my oldies (retrofitted million times) and I kinda love it.

To avoid the flipping you could try increasing the wheelbase length and/or go 2WD while driving in high G environments like Kerbin. If you feel like messing around a little bit more you could experiment with camber too: it is a good way to slighlty increase your wheelbase. The wheels you have there are pretty powerful compared to the weight you are carrying around, in my experience they could propel a 10t rover to 25m/s.

This looks awesome. However you forgot the Ion cannon turret.

Alas you need to slow down by burning all the way down to avoid the "too fast too low" barrier. If you make a quick search you will find that there are several threads about this issue with the current set of aerodynamic/heating rules.

I tried claws in 1.0.x and they do work, but they have some kraken issues: I had times when the claw did not want to undock anymore or even worse. However it does usually work. You might want to try to give a kind of propulsion to every single module with a mix of rover wheels and landing gears to avoid sending a dedicated trailer. Below the refueler/trailer I commonly use on Mun and a few other places. Usually all my "planetary modules" are wheeled and they have got their own claws to connect to their supposed "neighbours". So this simply goes around pulling/pushing things (better to pull than to push with this design) and drilling for resources if needed.

Would it be possible to "amend" this rule with a total lift limit of 1 but with a free amount of control surfaces (e.g. 4x0.25)?

If you are not against modding, Kerbal Foundries add quite a few wheels and crawlers apart from the antigrav repulsors. With that you will have plenty of new ways to solve your wheels issues.

Sometimes alternators are not enough or simply not applicable. I have a couple of designs in mind: "windmill" rover for Eve's surface and extra power supply for the Kerbal Foundries AG repulsors (that are indeed power hungry). Maybe a small Duna ion glider without tons of solar panels too. The "windmill" rover should work on some of the Outer Planets moons too, like Tekto. I know that a common RTG could solve all my issues, but just for roleplay sake, a RTG would decay while a RAT operated vehicle could last longer (theoretically, of course). EDIT: And this may lead to "electric/hydraulic operated cooling" too. Think about an electric actuated radiator that could be smaller but better performing than what we have now. The RAT then could be an interesting extra power supply to use just when you need it, during the re entry.

Hi all, I am pretty sure this is an easy question: is there any mod pack with a RAM Air Turbine included?

Yes, I brought my mammoth for the ascent the first time I was there and I discovered its "heatshield" skill. I did not try Jool in 1.0.4, so I do not have any feedback for that. The other planets obviously do not need an aerocapture (apart from Kerbin ). My choice to go bottom first depends on the fact that I failed all my "nosediving" attempts there due to overheating. I found it easier, that's why I am advertising it. If you correct your insertion as soon as you enter Eve's SOI it will be costly but, same as my nosediving attempts, I found it beneficial for my missions. Moreover poles are a pretty flat place where to land. North pole is rich in ore too. I think that the problem is not overheating itself, but the turbulent convection speed barrier. Or, at least, this is the issue I had to face the most. So airbrakes are extremely useful in reducing your speed. If you keep them outside the supposed aero flux they will not overheat but they will slow you down anyway (gaming the system...) I use them for aerocapturing too: as I wrote above I usually go for a 70000m (or 75000, depending on the shape of the craft, the sleeker the craft the deeper I can usually go) aerocapture, starting with a more or less 4000m/s speed. I try then to adjust for an almost circular orbit. To land I go for a slow approach lowering my orbit to a 95x80. In this case, orbital speed should be around 3200m/s that I try to correct to 2800m/s before 90000m. I agree with you, losing the speed is the most important thing to do: as you noticed I use to bring there huge stuff like mammoths, losing that speed is the costly part of my set up. And my hard times are related to the 15000-35000 altitude range, where I usually encounter the "too low too fast" brick wall. About the last point, I hope I succeeded in explaining how do I conduct my standard mission there. Approaching 90000m faster than 2800m/s usually does not give my ship enough edge to avoid being suddenly fried. Just for a closure: I tried once to reduce my horizontal speed to 0 while still outside the atmo and then I did the "Baumgartner": my ship got fried at 45000.

Do not dive nose first, nose cones are not as resistant as Mammoth engines. Mammoths are a lot better than heatshields: they do not ablate and they do not overheat as fast as the heatshields. If you experiment a little bit with that you will notice that in a comparable re entry situation a 3.75m heatshield will show a skin temperature in the range of the 2000° and counting while the mammoth will stay close to 750°/1000° all the way down. Extendable radiators will break up while descending at an average altitude between 45000 and 35000m if not extremely carefully shielded. They are however useless due to the fact that, as you already noticed, you'll be dead long before experiencing a normal overheating. A polar insertion will save you a few drag due to the less dense atmosphere. The best available transfer window will get you to the Eve rendez-vous at the "affordable" speed of around 4000m/s. I can not see any airbrake on your ship, they are extremely useful there. The plasma flux is not just a cosmetic effect anymore (not saying it works as intended, just that it works somehow): fairings might help in this case to shape an aerodynamic deflector. With this few "tricks" I usually manage to dig deep to 70000m for my aerocapture followed by a few adjustment aerobrakings. A free fall descent is almost impossible now: usually I constantly burn to control my descent speed - we could say that a "Eve rocks" lvl1 it is now less feasible than a Jeb level: better to go for a completely powered descent, no legs and no chutes or just a few of them to save some fuel. For a safe landing I usually try to pass the atmospheric 90k border at less than 2800m/s, less than 2100m/s @45k, from here till 11k you need to slow down 1100m/s at least - chutes opening altitudes by default are around 13000m for drogues and around 11000m for commons. So, yes, I agree that the game need some tweaking but it is feasible even if not particularly fun.

I think that rolling to turn should be forbidden. It seems to me that the OP had a drifting race in mind, excluding the "Red Bull" air race style.

Maybe a little bit of "goodwill" evaluating the difference between jumping and flying?

Well, I don't think this is a race for planes. Or at least I do not think this is what was intended. So I keep on my "car" design. Second attempt, same craft: 1.06 start - 6.06 finish - race time 5.00 - top speed 316m/s (that for a car is not bad). Get your Auricom 2097 here!