Wanderfound
-
Posts
4,893 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Developer Articles
KSP2 Release Notes
Posts posted by Wanderfound
-
-
I have seen some air-hogging designs, and I do feel like it is cheating with that. I prefer non-air hogging designs.
Likewise.
Air-hogging is not necessary on a well-built plane. I generally limit myself to one nacelle/ramscoop combo per engine, and occasionally a couple of radials (largely unnecessary, but I like the way they look). Works just fine.
-
http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/88628-Kerbodyne-D7-Heavy-X5-a-heavy-lift-SSTO-spaceplane
All stock parts, ~40 ton to orbit and back for about √5,000 (just an example, I get that you'd like to design your own). The idea that SSTO spaceplanes are restricted to light payloads is a myth.
-
Hard to tell with the low-res, but it looks to me like the ports on the station are installed backwards.
-
If this is an answer to my post, thank you very much.
But actually I was curious about what GoSlash27 meant with "without any separation between the wings means that they will no longer self-stabilize with dihedral" - is there another bug with clipping parts?
I'm not sure what Slashy was getting at, actually. But I generally don't tilt my main wing section, so if there is an issue it wouldn't have come up for me.
-
Dihedral means that the wings are angled up; the tip is higher than the root. Anhedral means that the wings are angled down; the tip is lower than the root.
Either of these will affect the banking/rolling (rotation around the longitudinal axis) behaviour of the plane. Dihedral promotes stability; the plane will naturally tend to return to level flight after banking. Anhedral promotes agility; the plane will bank rapidly, and tend to keep rolling once it gets going.
Setting anhedral or dihedral on wings will also affect the height of the CoL. Dihedral raises it, anhedral lowers it.
If you look at the plane I linked to upthread, there is a substantial amount of anhedral on the canards (the little wings on the nose). This was done partly for aesthetics, but also to compensate for the raised CoL caused by the high-wing design. The tail also functions slightly as a dihedral wing, due to the fact that the rudders aren't perfectly vertical.
-
my question is: is there some kind of a trick to building and flying SSTO's? I can never get them to work for me. they always crash or fall back to Kirbin or do not have enough thrust.
please help!
How to fly a spaceplane to orbit:
1) Get to 20,000m however you like. Around a 45 degree climb is probably most fuel efficient, but jet engines use so little fuel that it doesn't matter much. If the plane has enough power, I usually climb at 75 degrees or so just to get it done quickly.
2) When you get to 20,000m, level off and build some speed. You want to pile on as much horizontal velocity as possible while you make a slow ascent to 30,000m. Keep your angle of attack (the angle between where your nose is pointing and the direction in which the plane is actually moving, shown by the prograde marker when in surface mode) and climb rate low; by the time you hit 30,000m, they should both be around 10 or so. A low angle of attack reduces drag and helps your intakes work better. The low angle makes you climb slower, but that's okay; you need that time to get up to speed. As you go faster, the angle of attack required to maintain a given climb rate reduces, but as you go higher, the thinner air means that the angle of attack required to maintain a given climb rate increases. If you do it right, these two factors will roughly balance each other out and you should gain the necessary speed and altitude in a single smooth climb. However, a plane with some aerodynamic or piloting flaws may need to bounce up and down between 20,000 and 30,000m a couple of times while building speed before the final push.
3) Somewhere between 20,000m and 35,000m (exactly when depends on both plane and piloting), you'll start to run short of air. Don't switch to rockets immediately. If you've got multiple engines going, shut some down to concentrate the available oxygen into the ones you keep running. If you've already shut down as many as you can, throttle back a bit. You can dramatically increase your jet-only altitude by doing this, and once you get up to serious height the thin atmosphere means that you only need a tiny amount of thrust to accelerate.
4) Keep this going for as long as your plane and your patience can tolerate. A well-built and -flown plane should be able to get over Mach 4.5 and 30,000m in a single attempt on jets alone. Once you've wrung as much speed and altitude out of the jets as possible (you want at least Mach 4 and 30,000m), force the nose up to 45 degrees and light the rockets. If you have both jets and rockets, don't shut down the jets immediately; the thrust of the rockets will drive a ram-air effect that kicks the jets back into life for a while. Keep the rockets burning until your apoapsis exceeds 70,000m, then shut off and coast until it's time to circularise. Point prograde and close your intakes while coasting to minimise drag.
A good plane and pilot should be able to get the apoapsis to 70,000m with less than a minute of rocket power. Done properly, it requires very little fuel. But if you try to brute-force it from lower speeds and altitudes, the atmospheric drag is going to drain your oxidiser tanks before you get anywhere near orbit.
If you're having trouble with design rather than piloting, give http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89092-Kerbodyne-Scattershot-a-simple-and-easy-to-fly-beginner-s-SSTO-spaceplane a try.
-
My approaches are under 5m/s, but they're not under 1m/s, I'm not that good. I end up burning in circles if I try to approach too slowly.
5m/s isn't docking, it's ramming. If you can't get it down to below 0.5m/s you've got no chance. Ideally, you want to be moving at 0.1m/s at the moment of contact.
See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89294-Rondevousing-ness-ity?p=1326300&viewfull=1#post1326300 for how to do it.
-
We need more detail. Screenshots, preferably. What speed, what angle, what size ship, what mods, are your docking ports installed correctly, etc.
If you have the docking ports lined up, the ship in line with the port, you approach at less than 0.3m/s and turn off your SAS when you get close, it should connect.
RCS makes it easier, but it isn't absolutely necessary. Similarly, aids like the Lazor Docking Cam aren't necessary, but they do simplify things.
-
Incidentally, for an example of the prettyness made possible by the mod packs (Spaceplane Plus in this case):
-
Don't forget to hit "R" to activate the rescuee's jetpack.
-
PS: be careful with low wing designs. CoL lower than CoM = unstable. Use a raised tailplane to compensate.
-
Whenever i try to put them on the top or bottom, they are angled or perpendicular to the floor. How do I make them horizontal like I see everyone is doing? The only time they are horizontal is when they are on the midpoint of the fuselage.
Place your wings vertically on top or bottom then use ASDQWE to rotate them (in 90° increments; if you hold Alt, they'll move in 5° steps instead). Disabling angle snap may also be useful for fine-tuning position.
See http://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/threads/89092-Kerbodyne-Scattershot-a-simple-and-easy-to-fly-beginner-s-SSTO-spaceplane for an example.
-
I strongly disagree with this. Real life aerodynamics are radically different from KSP aerodynamics. My advice is to let form follow function. Build whatever works best in KSP and don't worry about what real hypersonic spaceplanes look like.
While it should be obvious that there's a bit of a fundamental difference in design philosophies between me and Slashy (
), I should point out that my advice is based on the assumption that FAR is in play. Aesthetic design has much less influence under stock aero.And, as always: build whatever you want. It's a game; so long as you're having fun then you're doing it "right".
-
Very keen to see this; the stock gear is inadequate for large cargo planes. A larger and stronger set of gear would be very useful.
-
I think what m4v is saying is that for his taste FAR is too realistic and people who are not aeronautical engineers may be overwhelmed by the degree of difficulty it adds. After all, not everyone here has a degree in fluid dynamics, physics or engineering. It all comes down to personal preference. If you want the realistic experience go with FAR, but the stock aerodynamics work much better for people who like to build huge spacecraft, and then there is NEAR somewhere in the middle. Play how you want to play
I find flying in FAR easier than stock, because it makes planes actually fly like planes. And my doctorate is in psychopharmacology, not aeronautics.
But, as you say: each to their own. One of the great strengths of KSP's sandbox nature and the modding community is that everyone gets to play the game that they want to play.
-
Or Rounds Per Minute.
Incidentally, the early models of the KTM Duke (the first production supermotard; basically a motorcross bike with street racing tyres and suspension) had a tacho that was marked in BPM: beats per minute. Doof doof doof.
-
because I get to launch big space station modules and huge interplanetary motherships that FAR would never allow. Normally such things would be constructed on site in space, but seeing as that's not a thing (yet?) I'll stick to hauling them up there in one piece.
Eh? All of my big stuff is lifted by spaceplane in pieces and assembled in orbit. Wobbly docking clamps aren't a problem if you make a tug that can pull instead of push. Wagon train to the stars...
-
Nah, don't give up so easily. Read Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card and zero-g combat maneuvers will make a lot more sense. I even had an idea for a projectile weapon that would work in zero-g:
In a traditional gun, the propellant (usually gunpowder) is contained by the closed breech (the end where the trigger is). All the force of the propellant goes into to forcing the projectile out of the barrel.
What if you had a mostly open breech and double (or more) the propellant? There would need to be some blockage of the breech to provide something for the propellant to push against in order to push the bullet down the barrel, but the open part would allow some propellant to counter act the force of the bullet pushing back on the propellant. The gasses escaping the breech would function like a sort of RCS thruster to hold the gun steady while it fires.
Don't worry, this gun won't blow your head off. This is strictly a vehicle mounted gun.
You've just re-invented the recoilless rifle: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recoilless_rifle
They have some uses, but they also have plenty of disadvantages.
-
FAR makes planes fly rather than swim. Never going back.
-
If you install the Crowd-sourced Science Logs mod, does it affect the sandbox?
-
Hard to believe something like RPM is not in stock gameplay.
I've been reading the GURPS forums for too long. Whenever I see "RPM" I read it as "Ritual Path Magic".
Keep this quiet, or I'll be thrown out of the International Brotherhood of Bikers; I should be reading it as "revolutions per minute".
-
I haven't gone back except when upgrading versions of KSP. I stick with FAR mostly because it introduces other challenges. Have you tried interplanetary return missions? I can't think of a way to land even a probe that's capable of returning from Eve because every design I come up with is ripped to shreds during the descent.
Streamline, streamline, streamline, and come in shallow and nose-first. My Mun/Minmus landers these days have aerodynamic nosecones and heavy strut reinforcement, and I never pop the chutes until I'm thoroughly subsonic. A couple of cautious aerobraking passes aren't a bad idea either.
-
Just popping in to let you all know that the moderation staff has pruned a few posts along a line of conversation that was both off-topic and veering too far for comfort into prohibited political discussion. Let's try to keep the discussion on the implications of future technology developments and away from ongoing and possibly highly-contentious current events, alright?
Okeydoke; sorry for that.
-
And a general design tip: if you're trying to build a hypersonic spaceplane, make something that looks like a hypersonic spaceplane. Aircraft are shaped the way they are for a reason.
), I should point out that my advice is based on the assumption that FAR is in play. Aesthetic design has much less influence under stock aero.
Kerbodyne D7 Heavy X5: a heavy lift SSTO spaceplane
in KSP1 The Spacecraft Exchange
Posted
It was designed with FAR in operation, but it shouldn't require it. Do you get any sort of error message when you try to access it?
The tweakables on all of the control surfaces have been tuned (i.e. airelons set to affect pitch and roll but not yaw, rudders set for yaw but not pitch/roll, forward control surfaces set as maxed-out flaps, etc); it's possible that I adjusted something that FAR allows you to alter but stock doesn't (I never fly with stock aero; can't stand it, personally. If you're getting into spaceplanes, FAR or NEAR is highly recommended).
If you want, I'll post a version with all of the tweakables reset to default values.