Ice30

Wow that's impressive, looks awesome!

Thanks for keeping this mod alive wavefunction! Just had a few issues with precoolers, they show as being online however the engines are sometimes well over 1700 degrees and other times -300,000 degrees, it seems to vary if i detach the engine\precooler and reattach in the VAB. Is anyone else having issues with precoolers?

I'm sure this has been asked before but i don't have the patience to go through the entire thread... Is there any plans to implement something like a hydroponics food replenishment system or something? The only thing putting me off this mod is not being able to replenish food so I can't build distant bases without having tedious resupply missions to replenish food supplies (which seems especially silly for a biome like laythe where you would expect growing things would be easy). If something like this was implemented I would get this mod in a heartbeat.

Okay so I have done a few tests and I realized that it's much more difficult to control your pitch with a heavy payload and the best way I found of controlling it is to look at the flight data on FAR which gives a decimal readout, then keep the change in pitch at a very low rate so you can pitch back when you are approaching the edge of the prograde marker. Additionally, having a fat and tall payload makes things even harder as the surface area of the payload is much greater than the surface area of your rocket once the main boosters are decoupled, so the payload needed to be made slimmer to increase the aerodynamic control. After learning all this I am saving about 900m/s delta v by launching my rockets this way instead of just going straight up and turning 90 degrees. Cheers everyone!

Thanks that did the trick i'm getting about 1gw now, i could definatley get more if I got closer to the sun (currently at 900km). Cheers man I will check that out! I'm making another solar farm now that is going to be a lot better than this one (and bigger). I will post it here once im finished!

Okay im really confused now. I worked out my energy flow from my solar panels at the orbit i am on to be 485284 yet after making that change to the EC of the transmitter im still only getting ~700MW? Is this right?

Ok thanks, I actually have 29k ec in batteries already, but i will try fiddling with the ec of the transmitter later today. Oh wow bad luck. I'm abating the wobble by having the whole arrangement tied together with struts until i'm ready to deploy (they come off when i separate the engines), then i'm using docking struts after it's deployed, which are basically like struts except you connect them while playing.

Oh ok thanks. But im not sure what 'hack' im supposed to do? Can you explain please? Hehe thanks. Don't think you could without the IF mod. I know it should be 'doesn't' btw lol was just using slang

Thanks. Thats odd you are getting 1gw as I have about 20k electric charge. I am using the solar panels from the near future mod in addition to the stock ones. Perhaps they dont work correctly? I will test this out and also try to get closer to the sun as currently they are about 950km

So I wanted to see how much power I could generate for the interstellar microwave transmitters by sending a large solar farm into a low solar orbit. I ended up using infernal robotics to create an array that is launched in a packed up configuration and then deploys using servos. At roughly 780 parts and 1000 tonnes at the launch pad with ~25,000 delta v (using the ionic thrusters from the near future mod) it's a complete dog to fly right from the launch pad until low solar orbit (which takes about 18 hours real time (at 4x phys time warp) to burn. But the result is beautiful, with a whopping ~380MW 1GW of power ready to transmit. The pictures are a little out of date to my current design as it was my second iteration that had a plasma engine, which i ended up changing back to the original ion engine which i am flying now, so just ignore the plasma engine. Mods used are: Dynamic Farings Docking struts Infernal robotics FAR Near future mod I may have used a component or two from B9 aerospace - not sure Interstellar mod Let me know if anyone wants the craft file. I wasn't sure if anyone would want it as you would have to be a bit of a masochist to want to do an 18 hour real time burn (I've done 2 myself so far and am working on a third ), plus it lags like hell.

Thanks for all the replies, I will try out your suggestions and let you know how I go after my exams this week

I have been using far for a little while now and i can never work out what flight profile i should be using. Based on the forum page saying: I tried this, and sometimes it works but other times my payload (which is encased in dynamic farings) just topples over when executing a low altitude gravity turn (at whatever angle even when following the prograde circle). Interestingly I have found the only way to not get my payloads to topple over so often is to launch until i'm on the edge of the atmosphere and then pretty much turn 90 degrees, which does not seem realistic at all. Have other people experienced this? What am I doing wrong?

Haha this. It's no wonder some kerbals (especially jeb) laugh like maniacs throughout an entire mission lol

I would definitely look at reducing your mass capi3101. The reason things are breaking off is the engine is struggling to simulate that amount of parts and mass. A lander for eve should also have a **** tonne of landing legs to act like suspension to cushion the landing. Consider decoupling all these legs (and parachutes) before take off. I'm not keen on using the command seats for spacecraft as they are unrealistic and kind of feels a bit cheap and not in the spirit of KSP, but having said that you could consider this too.

Thanks everyone. Since conquering eve I have been trying to make extremely efficient rockets to travel to some of the closer planets. I will post my creations once I have finished!

Hm I tried editing my post because the html tags stopped working and now it has disappeared Tried posting the thread again but now awaiting approval.... Help?

Hi! First post around here so i'm not sure who is interested in my accomplishments in KSP but I thought I would post them up anyway! Maybe it will help other kerbonauts I have been playing KSP for just over a month now and am completely hooked. I been playing in career mode and have visited most planets\moons and unlocked all tech, so I thought it was time for a manned science mission to Eve. The only mods I have used in this mission are flight engineer, docking struts (I learnt it's impossible to dock large ships together without this as it wobbles to all hell), mechjeb (originally did not want to use mechjeb but had to, you'll see why), scansat and some visual improvement mods. Ok so here goes. As my space agency had never actually visited eve or it's moon Gilly before a preliminary feasibility mission was required due to the known conditions of eve's atmosphere and probable gravity. It was assumed that due to Gilly's small size and in turn it's low gravity a survey mission would not be required there as worst case scenario the Gilly mission could be aborted and it wouldn't greatly effect the delta-V required to return home after the mission to Eve. It was also known that Eve's atmosphere is incredibly thick so a high altitude landing site would be very important to avoid the worst of it. The survey mission would consist of 4 parts: Establishment of 4 polar elevation survey satelites Review of elevation data and landing site selection Landing of science rover Land based selection of landing site for manned mission The science rover would contain two lots of experiments so that the rover could be driven into a shallow part of the ocean and conduct experiments and then drive onto the land (and eventually the high altitude manned landing site) and conduct the rest of the experiments. The experiments would then be left in this state for later retrieval by the manned mission. This mission was conducted without mechjeb (which I had never used up to this point) and I found that landing my rover where I wanted it to land manually was practically impossible! (Especially with the visual enhancement mod which made the atmosphere so hazy you could not see where you were going to end up, so I had to turn that off temporarily) I had serious issues trying to land within a few kilometres of where I wanted to. So after this experience I decided to use mechjeb for the manned mission as the landing site I chose was next to some very steep slopes so precision landing was paramount. After this mission an 87 tonne lander with 8300m/s delta v and high TWR was designed with the help of flight engineer (to easily calculate delta v). The lander uses a large fuel tank to maneuver it away from the interplanetary section and into a landing trajectory. The fuel tank is then ditched when no more\very little burn would be required for landing, which would be taken care of with parachutes. Due to the high gravity on eve many landing gears would be needed to provide a nice cushion to land on. All these landing gears and parachutes would then be ditched at the moment of lift off from eve. Introducing the Titan 1: To avoid a monstrous design the Titan 1 booster stage has enough delta V to get into a 100x100 orbit around kerbin (it also ditches all debris back into kerbin as I am already developing some pretty scary conditions at my favorite 100x100 orbit). The interplanetary\return home stage would then be docked with the lander. Another refueling ship would be required to top up the tanks of RCS fuel and a small amount of liquid fuel, this refueling stage would also include a landing attachment for turning the pod used on eve into a gilly lander equipped with experiments and a wide dispersion of 3 landing gears. This attachment would also prove useful for bringing the eve pod (which has no RCS thrusters to save weight) back to the station. The return home ship would be able to bring the eve pod back to kerbin for keepsake (and bonus science points). Docking interplanetary stage with the Titan 1: The flight to eve went pretty well, however even with mechjeb the landing on the high point of eve was very difficult as mechjeb kept wanting to do a suicide burn instead of gently using my parachutes which meant that I was still hurtling towards the surface when my parachutes deployed which completely ripped my lander apart. After many reloads I figured out that if I offset my landing location by 5 minutes (in degrees, minutes seconds) away from my desired landing location, turned mechjeb off when I was on target and then deployed my chutes, I ended up pretty spot on to where I actually wanted to be. After successfully landing I was like WooHooo!! haha. After that Jeb climbed into the rover and despite mission control's protests he took off down an incredibly steep slope towards the ocean to go for a swim (and an ocean sample). Jeb tackling some crazy 4wd'ing: Jeb enthusiastically jumps into the ocean only to realize he hates swimming: Jeb eventually got bored of hanging around eve and was reminded by mission control he should not spend more than one eve day on the surface (which means due to the rotation of the planet an additional burn would be required for rendezvousing with the station, which was no problem as I still had 1-200 delta V left) The last couple of photos show the gilly lander converter (or the claw as I call it) After that everything was docked back to the interplanetary stage and a burn towards gilly was performed. However this is where I had problems... The interplanetary stage was running low on fuel and did not have enough to retrograde at Gilly. So instead of partially refueling it out of the return home stage (which had a pretty liberal amount of delta v anyway) it was actually more efficient (delta-v wise) to assemble the return home stage, dock the claw onto it (which made it annoyingly lop sided and very hard to fly) and then fly the landing pod, separately, to Gilly. A small amount of fuel (about 80ms worth) was left in the interplanetary stage so that it could retrograde and crash back into eve and the two flights were underway. Due to the pods incredible TWR of about 300 or so the pod was maneuvered to undertake the retro burn first (as I like to start with success ). This worked well and I got the pod into a good orbit around Gilly. The hard part was the lopsided return home stage, which I failed to fully retro at Gilly... However my burn was enough to closely match Gilly's orbit and after several days another intercept with Gilly was made in which I was able to finish the retro burn. This time Bill took the helm and completed a successful mission at Gilly. You can tell how pleased he was: The mission home was split up into two landings. The pod would be landed first which would be the most dangerous as it has no parachutes and would fully rely on a retroburn (which I would leave to mechjeb since it seemed to so badly want to do it before on eve). All the scientific data was moved to the main return lander as this pod has parachutes and landing gears so I knew that it would return home unscathed. I fired a small retroburn of the main return lander just after intercept with kerbin to delay the lander by about 45 minutes to give me time to perform both landings. Both landings were successful and a whopping 3582 science points were accumulated (not including roughly 4-500 or so worth of transmitted data). The rest of the screenshots: Hope you enjoyed my story!