herbal space program

Brought to you by the magic of Infinitely Spammable Massless Parts, behold the Flying Death Ray Model 1 interplanetary Kerbocycle. It's core is a T-800 with a Mark 1 jet fuselage behind it. It has 4 more T-100 tanks mounted on radial hardpoints. The main engine is a RAPIER, with 4 ion propulsion units serving as orbital maneuvering engines and landing legs. It also has 6 LV-1R mini-engines for initial takeoff assist. As documented in the album, on its maiden interplanetary voyage it landed on Mun, then on Minmus, and then made it back to the KSC. I was pretty sloppy about it too, so I think I could manage something more impressive if I planned more carefully. Abandoning the VTOL capability for longer range yielded the Model 2, which I'll post separately.

For those too lazy to futz around with downward-pointing VTOL engines, there's always this option!

That was easy. Thanks!

This is the first in a series of SSTO designs I'll be posting here. I don't have a generic cloud storage account at the moment, but if there's a way to do so without one, I'll post the .craft file. Everything is stock except for the vertical engines, which are NP RMA-3's. Fully fuelled, it can just barely hover off the runway at the KSP, but takes to the air nicely if you engage the turbojets just as you lift off. It can fly stably in either horizontal or vertical mode until it's almost empty, at which point vertical mode required putting a thrust limiter on the forward pair of engines. Taking off from the KSC, it can land on Mun without orbital refueling but can't quite make it back. Not the greatest range, but I'm proud of how balanced I got it to stay in both modes throughout most of its flight profile. It was definitely an educational design experience for me.

In my experience, is the COL ball is far enough forward that it's central axis is no longer inside or tangent to the COM ball, I have trouble. I've actually had planes with a fair bit more control authority than yours looks like it has flip out with the COL that far in front. Another thing you might try, btw, would be to put an inline cockpit further back, towards the COM. That way its reaction wheel torque will be much more effective in keeping your plane steady.

FWIW, I dealt with this issue by putting a little roll on my ship as I hit the staging button. That caused the ejected stages to move away from the rest of the ship enough not to knock its engine off. If I had already made my gravity turn, I also made sure the stages to be ejected were on the sides and not above/below the rest of the craft.

Are you sure your reaction wheels aren't running out of juice somewhere along the line? Not all engines produce electrical power.

I'm totally with you on this. I posted a thread here a few days ago however begging for a regular (i.e. not a command pod and equal torque in all 3 axes) inline reaction wheel module in the Mk2 shape and got no love whatsoever. At least my complaining about that will give you one reply!

I really like the multi-body point multiplier system, but what I have in mind is for single-stage vehicles only. Allowing the dropping of parts really makes it a completely different challenge.

I like it! If I were to post one though, I would require that you land the whole ship on the moon and take off again. Using LOR makes the whole thing quite a bit less difficult, since you only need to drop a tiny lander down the Mun's gravity well. Moreover, after messing about a bit more and seeing how far you can actually get, I think it would be more fun if the objective was landing on multiple bodies. Right now what I envisage is different numbers of points for each body you might land on and return from, based on total deltaV required, For example, I might give 3 points for Minmus, 6 points for Mun, and 1,000 points for Eve. I would also add point multipliers for multiple bodies, upping the body-specific score by a larger factor for higher numbers in sequence. For example, Mun might be worth 6 points as the first body, 12 points as a second body, and 24 points as a third body. In each case, you would have to completely exit the body's SOI, return to the surface, and then back to Kerbin for successive landings on the same body to count. Additionally, I would have multiple classes, with higher base scores for the heavier ones. These would include Kerbocycles with only an ECS, Mk1, Mk2, and Mk3 cockpit-based designs. I would probably also have a score enhancement for not using nukes and one for carrying 5+ kerbals. All parts would have to be stock, and no navigational aid mods, aerodynamic mods, or extreme part clipping would be allowed. It seems like this would allow for many different strategies for getting the highest score, making the challenge more interesting overall. Anyway, I currently have both a Mk2-based design that can probably do a Mun-Minmus tour and a kerbocycle that has well over 6,000 deltaV at LKO. Once I have these documented as seed missions, I'll probably go ahead and post the challenge. It will be very interesting to see what people can come up with!

Thanks! Not sure why I didn't think to click on that link on the Wiki page.

Hello fellow Kerbonauts, In an earlier discussion about optimizing the range of single-stage vehicles, it was mentioned that some parts, e.g. STAT panels, ladder rungs, etc. don't actually add any mass or drag to a ship. I looked for info about this on the Wiki, but all it said was that this was implemented in 0.23 without listing the parts. I looked back in the forum for the 0.23 announcement, but I saw no mention of this in the new feature list and no link to a more detailed change log. Could some kind soul please let me know where to find the list of parts that have had this property? Thanks!

Thank you everybody for all the good advice. After replacing my Vesta engines with a couple of nukes and dropping about 4 tons of fuel, my plane can now make it easily!

I actually did put two nukes on, and after my TMI I still have a good 2000 deltaV left, I've got it made in the shade.

I'm guessing if I drop a couple of fuselage sections and put nukes for my engines I'll get a plane that makes it easily as well. I'll probably try that this afternoon. Clearly, higher hoops, like no nukes, size sub-challenges, multiple landings, etc. will be required to make it more interesting.

I tried this before with a probe core as the root part and I couldn't get a Kerbal pre-loaded into the seat. Is there some trick to this or did I maybe just not have the part placed correctly?

So do the science experiments, i.e. barometer, gravioli, etc. have drag? I could pitch 4 of those over the side.

Right now, I'm starting to gain speed only very slowly at around 1800 m/s (orbital) at 30km. I usually get it up to around 1900 by the time all my extra jet fuel runs out, at which time I fire the rockets and pitch up. Flameout usually happens around 33km. I assume less drag would allow me to go faster at this stage before the fuel runs out.

For my part, I want it to look like a plane, but these things you listed are obviously legitimate design choices. If I post a challenge around this, I think I would have different categories for freestyle, Mk1, Mk2, and Mk3 cockpit-based designs, because there ought to be a reward for actually making it look like a plane. I also think I would have all-stock and no extreme part clipping as ground rules.

Hmm. I'd like to add more depth to the SS Munar challenge, but I don't want to seem impertinent. How do you think it would be received if I did one with optional achievements for things like lowest total deltaV, visiting both Mun and Minmus, no nukes, making a polar landing etc.?

Hello all, Apropos of the Single Stage to Mun and Back thread I started a couple of days ago, in which I got lots of helpful design/piloting advice for my own SSTMAB, I'm now curious if anybody has turned this objective into an official challenge. I didn't see one in the first couple of pages of the challenges forum, but that doesn't mean there isn't one. So is there? If not and I get mine working, I will start one. Suggestions made by commenters on my design question thread have provided a nice list of knock-on achievements to round the challenge out....

Do they still have drag? Because I think that's where all those little extra bits would deal me the biggest performance hit. If I could just get 200-300 more m/s out of my jets when I top out, I'm pretty sure I'd make orbit with enough deltaV left to go to Mun and back using the engines I've got.

Absolutely right. It feels a bit desperate to dispense with that, but if I have to I most certainly will

I admit I have greatly desired this, but outside of some KW and NP parts I am trying to stick with stock. They really should implement this in stock though. Modeling Kerbin re-entry trajectories as if it were an airless body is pretty much useless.

With all due respect, just telling me that I should build a better space ship is unhelpful. What do you mean by that? If you have actual design advice for my self-imposed SSTMAB challenge, then please give it to me. Are you saying that using wings to fly out of Kerbin's atmosphere is a waste of mass? Then tell/show me what you built instead! I have no doubt that others have come up with better solutions than I have. I'm sure I could go look them up if I really wanted to, but the whole point of the game is to figure it out yourself as much as possible, isn't it? The reason it's such a great game is that really smart people find it challenging. In my book, it ranks up there with (net)Hack, Half-Life, and Civilization among the best computer games ever created. In this instance, I was sufficiently confused by KSP's version of multi-body physics that I was unsure how to optimize my approach to Mun, and didn't want to spend countless hours figuring it out by trial and error. To my gratification, I got a great deal of very helpful advice and ideas from a bunch of friendly people here (thank you!). From you, not so much. Why?