Wanderfound

More trial runs from the Minmus Iceracing Championships! Crossing live to our onboard cameras... Hmmn, the boys don't look quite as calm as you would expect from professional race pilots. There's definitely something wrong here. Going okay... Getting a little bit squirrely. Oh. Back to the mechanics, I guess. Stay tuned; more race news to come.

Related: is there some way to tweak the physics range parameter? Make it so that it only does physics within 100m or so?

Team Kerbodyne Racing finally puts in an appearance at the Minmus Iceracing Championships! Finally unveiled, the official entry of Team Kerbodyne (not renegade, although occasionally a bit naughty) Racing: the Kerbodyne Icedancer. Representatives from Kerbodyne SSTO Division report that a street-legal version of this craft will be made available for sale to the general public as soon as the winner of the prestigious Minmus Snackosaurusâ„¢ Cup is decided. Although the construction of spectator concession facililties is still to be completed, the keenest of the Kerbodyne race fans were already in attendance. While the mysterious "aerodynamic failures in vacuum" issue was finally tracked down to the result of sabotage affecting the Mechjeb cruise control unit of Team Kerbodyne (renegade) Racing, it appears that we have not heard the last of strange happenings upon Minmus. What could possibly be responsible for these bizarre angular lighting effects seen below? Team Kerbodyne Racing lined up for their first practice run... ...and immediately achieved quite respectable speeds: 805.2m/s, AKA 2,898km/h. Although there was a hint of desperation involved in clearing the hills at the end of their run. Unfortunately, this hill-clearing effort saw the Kerbodyne Icedancer achieve Minmus escape velocity without sufficient fuel remaining to come back down. Therefore, this time is once again ruled invalid. After the ship had been retrieved by the official race tug, the boys from Kerbodyne lined up for another go. Fortunately, Team Kerbodyne Racing seem to have brought plenty of spare parts with them. And hopefully a couple of spare pilots. Stay tuned; more exciting race news to come.

I'm putting together a ridiculously elaborate setup for the Minmus Iceracing Championships. So far, I've got two pair of giant vertical SSTO's functioning as the start/finish line marker posts, some grandstands to hold about a hundred Kerbals, and a dozen iceracing spaceplanes parked in the background. Unsurprisingly, this is making my laptop cry; all of these ships are 100+ parts each. Is there any way to disable physics on the parked ships? Something that would just turn them into immobile bits of scenery without bothering my computer with a squillion irrelevant physics calculations? Preferably temporarily, but it's Sandbox so they don't absolutely need to be flyable again. What about something that lets you set up a persistent "ghost" image of a ship, so I could put them in place and then fly the real ships back out of physics range? Something like this would make setting up elaborate cinematics a lot easier, and might also have some application in reducing the physics lag when approaching a crowded space station. Does such a thing already exist? If not, how feasible is it to create something like this?

Absolutely. I use FAR and DR; I don't use fairings. No objection to them, but I had some bug issues with PF just after .24 came out and never got back into the habit. Streamline and strut, small landers with nosecones and decent structural integrity. Pop the nosecones off with decouplers once you're in orbit. No real reason not ​to use fairings, though.

Grandstand preparing to land on Minmus...

Exactly as per title: what are your favourite books about real-world space flight, and why? To begin: Mary Roach, Packing for Mars http://www.maryroach.net/packing-for-mars.html Light-hearted and easy reading about the biological aspects of space travel. Food, hygiene, "waste disposal", etc. Guaranteed to make you fall over laughing at least a few times. Dava Sobel, A More Perfect Heaven http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2011/3262.html A comprehensive history of the life of Copernicus, drawing heavily upon primary sources. Dava Sobel is always worth the read; check out Galileo's Daughter as well. Deborah Cadbury, Space Race http://www.universetoday.com/1017/book-review-space-race/ A history of the parallel development of the early days of the US and USSR space programs, with a focus on the personalities of the designers involved. Korolev was a dude. What else have you got? .

A few reasons for the Aerospikes: * See sig below; FAR in effect. Ferram's alteration of the speed/thrust curve makes it difficult to get a pure air breather much above Mach 5 these days, especially if you don't want to waste ten minutes on a run-up. * I don't have any trouble getting my designs to orbit (or interplanetary), so there's no reason to sacrifice coolness or sporty performance for ultimate efficiency. My stuff tends to be either "flying sportscar" or "orbital Concorde"; even the utilitarian things are intended to be fun to fly and very, very fast. * Aerospikes look way nifty, and having a big chunk of extra thrust available that is relatively fuel efficient in both space and atmosphere is a bonus. I use them as if they were afterburners for the jets; going to space is not the only use for rocketry. * I don't like LV-N's, for self-imposed-handicap reasons, so I don't use 'em much. On things like the Migration Aerotrain, the Aerospikes are intended for use as the interplanetary transfer engines (while still making a substantial contribution to atmospheric performance, and having enough grunt that it doesn't take forever just to boost for Minmus).

Mechjeb is nifty, but it can't match a good human pilot. Try switching to surface mode on the navball and keeping it headed atmospheric prograde manually. If you must use MJ, again: surface mode, not orbital. You'll need to continuously adjust the pitch setting as you come in, by just a degree or two at a time. But for either of those approaches to work, you need some control authority. Three options: 1) Lotsa SAS 2) Vernors/RCS for vectored thrust 3) Fins with control surfaces Changing your engines for a few of the small radials might ease the weight distribution, too. You need your CoM to be in front of your CoL.

A few old discussions from elsewhere on the flaws of the shuttle that should be of interest: http://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/3136799.html http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/07/bad_blogger_no_entry.html

Yah. Basically, you need to fly it like an aircraft. If you let your nose get any substantial distance from prograde while you're still in the high supersonic, you're going to snap in half. That's a feature, not a bug. If you can, reenter with a single part capsule or something with wings and control surfaces. These days, if I want to get something like a Mun lander back down intact, ti gets reinforced and streamlined just as much as a hypersonic spaceplane would be. Nosecones, struts, etc. Also worth making sure that the parachute is directly attached to the bit with the Kerbals in it, just in case.

I was actually thinking curved-on-bottom, flat-on-top. Possibly with radial mountability underneath to remove the need for the docking clamp. Not intended as a removable pallet, just as a flat floor for the bay; sacrifice some volume for tidyness. But I suppose a cubic octagonal or something underneath would do the job just as well, and save wear and tear on our hard-working modders. The corners of the support aren't visible from under the ship?

While we're going for crazy aircraft bits, how about some of this?

Likewise. Possibly just a teensy bit smaller than the Enterprise​, though.

Heavily tempted to start muttering about "engage docking mode" next time I sit down somewhere.

As usual with single-choice polls, my answer is somewhere between the available options. If the part is cool and it works, then it's all good. The only problem with parts that require custom plugins is the possibility that the new plugin might be buggy or break something I already have installed. RPM or Firespitter are safer options in that case, but even they go haywire occasionally. The preferable way to do it is often like the way RPM or TC-LS works: if you've got those addons, they add functionality to the part, but if the addon is missing the part still works, just minus that feature. If you can, make the addon bits a bonus, not a necessity.

Start and finish lines now in place; supporter's planes beginning to fill up the parking lot. Just gotta build the grandstands and I'm good to go. I'm planning on featuring as many of the finalists from Sirine's "Better SSTO Spaceplane Challenge" in the scenery as possible. If there's anything else that anyone wants to show off, send me a craft file and I'll see what I can do. Just so long as there aren't any mods required apart from SP+, the part count isn't so excessive that it would kill my laptop, and the ship has the range to reach Minmus and the ability to land on the ice flats. Doesn't even have to be a spaceplane; a few rocket landers parked in the background would be cool. Rovers welcome, if they come attached to a ship that can get them there. Once I'm done, I'll post the save file as well in case anyone else wants to have a run with the same background scenery.

Aww, thanks. Everything here is designed and tested with FAR in operation, so may not work at all in stock aero (especially the bigger stuff). The drag models are radically different (stock atmosphere is absurdly dense and applies drag to all parts regardless of orientation or shielding; FAR/NEAR treats things much more sensibly) and even the SPH markers shift between the different systems. See the images from myself and Kasuha in the thread at http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/91511-Spaceplane-Speed-Challenge-2-Fastest-time-from-orbit-to-runway for a clear demonstration of what I'm talking about. FAR (and even more so NEAR) is nowhere near as scary as it's made out to be. Yes, it's not as easy as stock, but it's still very forgiving by flight-sim standards. I'm physically impaired at the moment to a degree that has me struggling to hold a pen and write, but I can still fly. You can't get away with casually doing the sort of aerial handbrake turns that stock permits, but if you fly sensibly you're fine. Each to their own, and whatever's fun for you is all cool, but as always I'd strongly recommend that you at least give FAR/NEAR a try. Stock is easier, but it gets very tiresome; it takes forever to slog to orbit in stock, whereas in FAR I can get to space in just a few minutes. As a non-threatening middle ground, you might get some benefit from taking the Benchmark for a spin in stock. Its tuned-for-FAR aero balance is not what you'd do if you were intentionally making a stock aero plane (again, see the discussion between myself and Kasuha in the challenge post), but stock air is so grippy that it doesn't matter much. If you can fly the Benchmark in stock without constantly spinning it, you should be able to adapt to FAR/NEAR without much trouble. If you want to, that is. However you have your Kerbal fun is fine by me; there is no one true way. But I do think that aircraft are a lot more fun when you get them out of the stock soupmosphere. See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/90747-Kerbodyne-SSTO-Division-Omnibus-Thread?p=1360129&viewfull=1#post1360129 for some basic starting design tips.

Combining hefty cargo capacity, lightning atmospheric speed and extreme interplanetary range, the Kerbodyne Brutus proves that just because it's big doesn't mean it has to be slow. Takes off easily with a sensible payload, and with just a bit of effort can lift substantially less sane cargoes. As usual, check the action groups; keep the flaps on for takeoffs and landings, but pull them back to neutral in flight. Kerbodyne accepts no liability for any environmental or ground crew worker's compensation claims arising from the use of the nuclear thermal rockets as heavy-lift takeoff boosters. Requires SP+ and FAR/NEAR. Optional paintjob by Kerbpaint. https://www.dropbox.com/s/lous4o9ytuqojfr/Kerbodyne%20Brutus.craft?dl=0

All of my "must have mods" are utilities, not part packs. RCS Build Aid, Kerbal Flight Data, Kerbal Flight Indicators, Kerbal Alarm Clock, Part Angle Display, Enhanced Navball, etc. Plus, of course, FAR, DR and EVE. Gotta have clouds. Spaceplane Plus is the king of the part packs, though. No clutter, no cheesy SF nonsense, just a curated boutique selection of gorgeous and functional spaceplane bits that also make some fine vertical rockets if you're creative in your construction. The cargo bays can handle 1.25m parts so long as you don't tack on too much radially mounted clutter.

Even better: strut your wings (from beneath, to hide the ugly) with symmetry on. Then, move them a bit. You now have one set of struts underneath one wing and one set of struts above the other wing. And, because the starting strut node gets buried in the wing (normally a good thing, because less ugly), it's impossible to take the struts off again. Trash wings and start again. Aargh.

Yup. Have you seen Khet? Non-virtual laser chess. Very good game; simple rules, but chess-like strategic depth. http://www.khet.com

But in very useful ways. Shimmy's Throne is going to feature heavily in the grandstands for the Minmus Ice Racing Championships.

And beer: http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/66220-Bond-Aerotech-Shimmy-s-Throne-1-3-1-F100-jet-engine-Updated-15-AUG-14

If you do end up installing FAR for testing as well, give it a go in both. Should be an interesting comparison. As with DaMichel, check beforehand to make sure that nothing but the rudders are set to affect yaw. You may also need to reset action group 1 to toggle the Aerospikes; apparently Hot Rockets is responsible for the action group weirdnesses everyone is getting.