Archgeek

And here are the results of thinking smaller: This thing can just about hop into the air at ~13m/s, but only briefly. It needs about 18 m/s to sustain take-off. Still not as slow as I'd like.

After realizing I was quite wrong about power generation being a lost cause here (It needs to last at least as long as your xenon does), I've seen fit to break the challenge down into two main sections: Come up with an airframe that gets a very low take-off speed while carrying a bunch of batteries and some power generation. Tweak that general design to get enough thrust from ions to maintain if not hit that take-off-speed. To the end of step one, I've been experimenting with multiple hulls and extreme usage of that 12:1 lift/mass ratio the basic fin pulls off: This thing will take off at just under 25m/s as tested with a single juno, but a trio of ions could hardly even push the thing past 6. The airframe also likes to dance and spin out as it approaches take-off speed, so I sense I need to think smaller.

Welp, I've gotten 13.8m/s running, after stealing 8.4 from the ramp down from the runway, and maxed around 30 going down the beach. A test with a couple of junos indicates the airframe with its 9 ions isn't too interested in taking to the air until 46m/s or so. Perhaps I need to think smaller, and perhaps the basic fin is lying about its rather nice lifting area to mass ratio.

HEH, just to take off? Cluster a lot of ions behind a long stretch of big batteries -- power generation would be a lost cause, here, and batteries are kinda light -- slap on a lot of wing surface, put it on minimal wheels, then burn with desperation.

HEH, seems like I might find myself with similar problem. 1.1.0 was running alright on my box, but steam quietly updated it to 1.1.1 before I got the chance to back up 1.1.0. Is it possible to snag the previous non-beta version?

Boy, this is an odd issue. Out of curiosity, @Bloody_looser, can you run your old and reforged .craft files against eachother in a diff tool of some sort, like notepad++'s Compare plugin? I'm downright curious about the diferences that might exist, but I can't touch dropbox here at work (lunch).

Doubtful, the aero overlay is an unmodified f12, and it just fires alongside taking a screenshot (regardless of which function you actually wanted). alt-f12 reads as a different keystroke, so steam doesn't pick it up. I wonder if it's specifically left-alt + f12 or something.

Sure is, alt=>f12=>physics=>thermo=>show values in context menus

You don't need trillions. I'm looking at a screenshot of a bit of a monster that runs .06-.1 TWR at something over 20km/s (KER bug means the number I'm seeing is low) that I can't upload from here that's under 800k, and patently re-usable.

10M shield's great for aerobraking! A pre-release stream saw it slow a craft into a Jool aerocapture, then gently drift downward. I'm guessing the craft would've exploded from the pressure eventually. If you're worried about the aerobrake heat with that much drag, take a radiator or two along to pump away the heat. Two large static rads can cool an infinifueled NTR to equilibrium, so they should help quite a bit here.

Ions are hecka great if if you've got a life support mod or otherwise have need of using a non-Hohmann trajectory to get somewhere fast. I've saved hours on end on a Minmus transfer back to Kerbin from a minutes-long burn.

Welp, in light of two conflicting opinions, I'll go ahead and post a bug report and see what happens. I've also added the large TCS to the album for completion's sake.

Engaging in some thermal testing with infinite fuel and an NTR, I noticed something odd about the large and medium TCS units -- namely, their centres of mass seem to be well offset from their attachment points. The question is, was this intentional? I honestly have no idea if these are supposed to be that way, and thus only viable in symmetry or opposition to an equivalent mass, or if this is a bug. I certainly didn't find anything searching the bugtracker or the support board, which makes me wonder if these are meant to do this for some reason. Can anyone lend a shard of elucidation?

Would a scene change suffice, or does it break it harder than that?

We've a kill warp button now? Sweet! I've been testing the whole time and never did catch that.

It took me far, far too long to get that; largely due to my brain associating those letters with the BACC SRB before anything else. Yup, I nearly lost the craft in my avatar to a self-amplifying oscillation (actually, I lost it repeatedly but kept restoring it via powerful chronosorceries before stumbling desperately on the solution). I'm tempted to put in a feature request for oscilation dampening, considering what really happens absent a viscous medium to carry energy away via sound is that large-scale, low-frequency flaperdoodles tend to decay into a high-frequency shipwide "ringing" which itself attenuates simply due to friction losses within the materials of vehicle.

Having derped about with the pre-release, I can say, significantly better. Though it's best when multiple ships are around (each tends to get its own thread). The current build does have a tendency to slow down a lot when one of my thermal extremis test craft hits a solar escape trajectory, though this may only occur when the thing's really hot and thermal data's being displayed in several pinned context menus. But pre-release bugs should have no bearing on the 1.1 release itself.

So very, very much. Prithee look upon the changelog:

Yup, now that Isp works correctly, they get next to no thrust down in the atmosphere. 'Not sure they ever had the TWR to make orbit on their own, though. 'Best I ever did was quite the trans-continental.

From time to time. I've even been known to use my own, like this one from before we had a stock LES:

@Padishar As requested in the Maximum Delta-V Rocket thread, though I thought I'd simplify things if I could: It rather looks to affect any craft using a fuel type that draws evenly from the craft under normal circumstances but will respect staging. I probably should've checked if aircraft droptanks are affected, too. 1.05 screenshots are using 1.0.19.4, 1.1 is using 1.1.0.1. Here're the craft files in question: KER Derping.zip

Drat, perhaps try making your own quad-couplers, with blackjack, and...erm, I mean do the girder thing mentioned above, but put those little FL adaptors on the ends of your 800s, with struts coming off those to the girder corners, then cap off the girder with the same so it still looks all spindly.

Heheh, no problem. Just construct one of those 40km/s monstrosities you see around, send it out for a gravity desist at Jool, then burn until the silly thing's in reverse and transfer to the target orbit. Maybe use KAC and go see a movie while you burn. XD

Actually, you can dock the silly things on the pad. Do quadcoupler=>tanks=>docking ports=>other docking ports(only one will attach but they'll be perfectly aligned)=>quadcoupler. The other three port pairs should almost instantly dock to each other once physics notices what's going on just after the craft hits the pad, Unless you're messsing around in the pre-release, in which case you'll be very disapointed and somewhat disturbed at the results.

Ah, this probably isn't the best realization of said use case -- you're looking at KER-1.0.18.0 on KSP 1.05 (It even comes up with a complaint "Unsupported KSP version... Please use 1.0.4"). 'Not sure why I've got an older version here, but I do recall VAB-breaking issues with 1.0.5 (Stock Bug Fix Plus, KER, KAC). I'll give it a shot in a 1.1 build after work and see what comes up. I will note the issue came up with part counts in the low hundreds -- that giant thing was just an extremis test.