Vigelius

This a million times, of course! Don't mistake my confusion and amusement for impatience or frustration.

Wow, good uptake on the engine question folks, thanks! In some ways it would make me quite happy if not all the mods are working properly yet - I've just bunged everything into 1.1 anyway ready or not and I'm having nightmares, but I genuinely don't know if it's the tech or my design. Faulty or absent animations with wings and engines and the odd freeze aside it actually plays ok, but my plane which should be absolutely fine is flying like a badly weighted fishing lure and I don't know why...

Hi all. I've been lurking here for a little while, got in too late for this tournament but hopefully will be entering the next one (provided I can get over my horrible flatspin issues!) Question I have is, since you all seem to be using different engines, what has been the reasoning behind your choices? I would expect a simple "MOAR POWER" approach, but am not seeing it in action across the board. Hopefully that isn't asking for jealously guarded secrets! ;p

This made me laugh, hard. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

Firstly, a confession: pretty much every successful plane I have made in KSP, space or otherwise, has been huge. Success has been more or less inversely proportional to mass. Oddly. That's not a status quo I was happy to let slide, so I've been experimenting with small purely atmospheric planes and having some success. But I have questions for you aerodynamic wizards out there. For reference, the craft I've been playing with are in the album below. 1. You'll see from the twin-engine plane that the engines are very low relative to the CoM. This causes absolutely no problem at all! I've tried them fully on top of the wing, fully beneath the wing and some different embedded setups, makes no difference. What's that about?? 2. On the other hand, the height of the CoL relative to the CoM makes a big difference but in the opposite direction to what I would expect. Every plane design runs into the 'lawn dart' concept at some point, whereby the CoL tries to align itself directly behind the CoM relative to the direction of travel. With that in mind, I would expect a plane with high CoL to be trying to pitch up the whole time, and vice versa. In practice, I find the opposite to be true and the balance very sensitive. Why?? 3. Anhedral and dihedral angle and high or low wing don't actually seem to have a very dramatic effect on roll stability. They do however seem to have a massive effect on pitch as per question 2. That is to say, in order to make a dramatic change to roll, pitch will be made totally uncontrollable. In which case, does the angle of the wing really matter?? 4. Yaw control escapes me completely. Example, true for both single and twin designs: i. apply starboard yaw input ii. vessel behaves as though fixed through an axis from cockpit roof to rudder tip, with force applied to port at rudder base iii. dramatic roll to starboard around this axis, involving a slight pitch drop and smaller yaw to starboard. I've tried bigger and smaller rudder, bigger and smaller vertical fin, vertical elements on the wingtips, vertical elements on the tail horizontals. So far nothing has worked at all. Any clues??? Selection of mods, FAR aerodynamics.

Personally I tend to mount my engines on fuel tanks which are embedded in the wings. That then provides a nice low point to attach wheels in a good wide, stable position. It also frees up a bit of main fuselage for cargo bay

I had a manned craft vanish from a stable orbit around Gilly, a few versions ago. Wrote it off as one of those things which just happen, and put up a memorial flag to the crew at KSC. A few days later they turned up together as the crew of a routine shuttle flight. I bet that caused a few awkward moments in the office...

Hodo, I'm curious about your beasts' TWRs - nothing I build gets anywhere close on what looks like similar engine setups. Are they from before the Great Nerfing, or have you found a way around that?

I've played a bit with Procedural Wings in the past - I found it was really good for the actual wings, but control surfaces and wing-mounted structures had symmetry issues which just annoyed me too much. That was a couple of versions ago though. I might have a play with more efficient engine parts at some point, although I suspect the increased endurance would come at the cost of a lot of my payload! And let's face it, I can already fly all day without stopping! Electric might be fun for a smaller plane though. I've barely ever played without MJ and FAR ever since v0.22, KSP just doesn't seem right without them any more! I've always found their aeroplane autopilot controls a bit dubious to say the least, but perhaps I'm just feeding in the wrong instructions? Totally agree about MJ snobbery but hey, we do the challenges we enjoy, because we enjoy doing them! So I've had a bit more fun with this beastie. First off, I have a nemesis. Namely in-flight docking, which I have fought and been defeated by before. Now I have fought and been defeated by it again: At least that proves I can fly another plane into my beast and it will be thoroughly unconcerned! In other news, I've made an attempt to pick up more achievements: I'm a big TTNeverunload user, which works great when the skydiver is in the air but seems to cut out the moment he touches the ground and causes the plane to vanish. Fortunately I have a quicksave to hand; this will just have to serve as a proof of capability. I suspect you may have guessed what is coming next...

I like to use two pairs of sepratrons, one at the bottom of the booster and the other at the top. The bottom pair fires in the same direction as the whole rocket, the top one is firing a few degrees outboard. That way the booster 'unhooks' and peels away safely without any unpredictable pivoting

This album seems to be getting a fair few outings lately! Jet circumnavigation of Kerbin, cruising at just over 7km, plenty of fuel left over:

So I've spent a little time faffing about with this, shifting, removing and replacing things to isolate the problem. The issue seems to be the sloped I-bars underneath the wheels, but there only seems to be a problem when the wheels themselves are mounted on a structural panel. When the wheels are mounted on another I-bar (as in the picture below), no problem at all. Why this would be, I have no idea. In the end, It became a service buggy I'm pretty pleased with. Case closed, unless somebody wants to hunt down the reasons for the I-bar/structural panel behaviour. Thanks folks!

So, to elaborate a bit - in the SPH all the wheels touch the floor, and are direct copies of each other oriented the same way. Upon launch this happens. On the other side, both of the rear wheels move up into the same position as the middle wheel in the picture. I have tried with only 4 wheels and the same thing happens, but only at the back. Nevertheless, the vehicle rolls straight and steers as though all the wheels are where they ought to be

I'm building a little runaround for zipping kerbals and gear around. Its going fine, except for something odd happening to the wheels when I launch it. Still drives as though the wheels are all on the floor, but it annoys me that they aren't! Anyone got any idea what's going on and how to fix it?

Here's one I made earlier! - Using B9 and FAR - Circumnavigated Kerbin in 3 hours - Carrying just over 72T tons of 'payload' - Enough fuel left over to do the whole thing all over again, and then some - Dropped its payload with a reasonable degree of accuracy over KSC Hits a few of the distinctions, but not as many as it could do because it wasn't built with the challenge in mind. I have no desire to sit through three hours of flying straight and level again, but I might do some extra stuff more locally if that would gain credit?

The real solar system mod means that instead of just over 2km/s at 70km, the lowest orbit is over 7km/s at 180km (as it is for earth) The realistic jet engines mod nerfs air-breathing engines massively (bringing them in line with reality) The challenge requires the use of these mods because they make it really, really hard!

Ok, I've updated the pics with the answers to that. Trouble is, with the SABRE engines running on H2 and O2 the fuel is really space inefficient. Great for slowing down on re-entry, but a real nightmare here! There is already a bit of tail-droop on the runway, I'm not sure how much bigger this thing can reasonably get. I'm beginning to wonder if it might be better to switch out for bigger engines with denser fuel. But then there isn't the mode-switching option, so I'll be carrying a metric crap ton of engines. [incidentally the newer pics show a couple of extra small-sized SABREs, because I thought being underpowered might be exacerbating my atmospheric losses. Turns out the small ones are too weak to make much difference...]

How close are people getting to this? I thought I'd have a go, having put together a Kerbin-capable Skylon prototype wih FAR and B9 without too much difficulty. Wow this is frustrating! I'm now using Advanced Jet Engines, Real Fuels, FAR, B9 and MechJeb, and really not having much luck at all! All I've found so far is that bigger seems to be better. My best result claims 7km/s dV, all of which gets binned into the atmosphere by the time I get above 20km. Here's an in-flight screenshot. Not that well lit I'm afraid: It flies reasonably well, at least... [edit: fixing picture]

True, but as soon as they pass out of the loading distance they lose aerodynamics and will fly like a rock, literally. I refer anyone attempting this challenge to this thread from a while back. Aerial rendezvous is proven to be possible, provided you have insane skills beyond the likes of me!

I built a large, stable aeroplane with a huge payload bay and a lot of fuel, so I decided to see what it could do. Turns out, it could do quite a lot! The pics are all labelled, have a look! Mods: B9, FAR

Love it! All those little components definitely add something to a moon base. And its always nice to see someone else have those familiar troubles with rover stability and mechjeb landings!

As far as I can tell, I have neither of those kicking around. And I haven't consciously downloaded them, so I would be surprised if I did! Trouble is, I can't find any reference to Real Engines in the RO stuff I have got. Dummy question: I've got a log, where do you want me to put it? I'm guessing I won't be popular if I start copying mountains of text into the forum!

I had that happen in 32bit, but everything was arranged fine in 64bit. I'm not going to start guessing why that might be, though.

No I don't. Yes, I realise I could just grab one of them and fly happy (and might yet). But I'm just a little curious about why I'm struggling to find Real Engines, since that was what I used in 0.23.5 and got along well with.

I'm having engine trouble: Real Engines seems to be MIA. The link in the Real Fuels thread points me here, but I can't find it anywhere. I've got a full RO setup working fully, but using liquidfuel and oxidiser for everything...