Archgeek

I should hope they plan to tweak the LV-N's thermal tomfoolery. Compressive heating and sound barrier have made for fun engineering and flight challenges, but the LV-N heating isn't fun -- its main job is long-ish transfer burns, and having it attempting to blow up the ship in exchange for doing its job when by all rights it should be slightly cooling the ship at high throttle settings, is really just annoying. I'd much rather have to mount secondary adjustment thrusters to get around the thing blowing up the ship at low throttle than crank my part count up trying to make ad-hoc radiative heat sinks. As things stand I'll either have to mess with the part config or expand my XenonStorm line beyond the scope of just Project Helios. HEHehEHhEhe, Tylo: Destroyer of Systems. I recall a simulation wherein it ripped the Jool system apart, ejecting either Pol or Bop into some messed up solar orbit, then managed to eject itself hard enough to go on to mess up Kerbin and Eve's orbits a bit.

The spaceplane version of the Stearwing goes pretty asymmetric. It also pulls weirdly to the right for some reason.

Oooh, I smell meat confusion. kN are blatantly SI units. So are grams, km, MW. Entities confuse SI units with SI base units. Strangely, the SI base unit for mass is the kg, not just the gram. KSP goes with a higher order of magnitude than the base unit due to the base unit being nigh-unto useless for the application at hand.

I am very glad to see this bug finally get trounced. It caused me all sorts of grief during the fastest trip to space and back challenge. 'Kept watching my giant side tanks pivot right into the core. (The bug was badly excerbated by the nature of the challenge, since the false torque was kinda proportional to speed and decoupler strength.)

Ah, I forgot a few: Spider Dispersal Device Springy! -- a thing that sort of happened while testing a super-heavy landing leg configuration stolen from Whackjob for my Eve return lander SPIDERS! The spider-related ones involved weird dancing i-beam configurations stolen from either Danny or Xactar. I wanna fill LKO with flailing metal to perform Kesler Syndrome: the Musical.

I'm with Necro on this, recovery is fine, being an abstraction for the task securing and returning landed/splashed down ships and parts. Hey, don't be clumpwhumpers. The fund return isn't some prize for accuracy, it's an abstraction of returning the old parts to the space center for refurbishing and refueling. The percent off you get further away comes from the increased cost of transporting rocket parts greater distances. The game's internal book-keeping is immaterial to the goal of a reusable space program. Besides, if how else but recovery and editing in the VAB can one implement additons and upgrades mission planners and engineers might want to apply to a craft for a given mission outside of stuff like swapping out entire dockable drive/leg modules for landers in orbit?

I'd say a toss-up between the Derpatron series of pre-XenonStorm experimental ion craft, the Very Bad Idea I, and more recently, a slightly failed bird-shaped spaceplane built for a stream named BURRD.

Kessler Syndrome eh? Better call half section.

Yup, just to pour salt on a dead horse, I had this exact same issue trying to use quad aerospikes in my Eve return lifter. 'Wound up with skippers and too little TWR because the spikes run hot to start with (as do LV-Ns), and they'll treat the part immediately above them as their one and only heat sink. 4 spikes sharing a quadcoupler as a heatsink -- immediate overheat bar, can barely run 'em at 60%. 4 spikes stuck on FL-very-small tanks on a quadcoupler, no problem. Bar shows up, but cooling's logarithmic so nothing explodes even at full power all the way, since each spike has its own personal heat sink. I should really redesign that lifter, thinking about it...I was quite fond of the transfer stage.

Actually, that issue very much is a bug. In the course of looking up a different decoupling bug (Kerbodyne decouplers only wanting to fire one at a time), I came across a discussion regarding the weird inward pivot in question, and it turns out it's a case of certain forces winding up inbalanced (in such a way that stronger decouplers actually make it worse) anytime a radial stage is dumped below the altitude that Kraken'sBane kicks in. I think it was related to the fix for decoupling stages that had been joined with struts.

Behold! The magnificently stupid Puddle Jumper Mk1 EX! Weighing in at just under 1.3 tonnes wet it used an ion engine to hover at .99 TWR on the Mun, hopping over craters and catching sweet air off ramps. With RCS thrusters and spaceplane wheels capable of over 63m/s on Kerbin, a single z100 battery pack somehow good for 8 second hops in darkness, it proved too big for a cargo hold and had to have its second probe core that actually faces prograde be selected and given control before it could even be used. I might address this in the Mk2 EX if there is one. Unadvisedly, I clamped it upside-down on top of the Kerbal-X to send it to the Mun for field testing, resulting in...questionable maneuvers to get it down to the surface. The tests were fairly successful, though: Significantly damaged, it could still take off from the lunar surface, and probably had the delta-v to return to Kerbin. Even severely damaged, it proved itself surprisingly capable. My piloting, however, left a bit to be desired. Regardless, it sure was a lot of fun to crash.

Hehehe, if KSP could simulate gravity effects like that, Tylo would tear the Jool system apart, and stand a fairly decent change of breaking free and eventually ejecting Duna from the Kerbol system altogether.

I'm partial to using multiple mk1 lander cans myself. I may've taken a page out of Whackjob's book on those legs... They're lighter than using a mk2, and let you still take two kerbals along, plus extra electric charge and monoprop.

HEH, wise choice with the retros. I would not want to turn that thing around.

Confirmed, the game derps for nearly two seconds on my older machine if dare to go near the staging interface. I'll have to check on that shader thing at home, though.

Okay, brainfart it is. Burning straight up and out does indeed eat more gravity drag, and going sideways benefits more from Oberth. (Gravity turn FTW) Well well, 'not surprised by that, but the search system here leaves a bit to be desired--it likes to glom onto one individual word rather than the whole phrase. Pathetically, I see one of those was yesterday, with another one before that! And with similar science! This just keeps happening! Such absurdium. Welp, that answers the heck out of a question that probably turns up too often around here. Thanks, everyone!

I had a bit of mind-thought regarding kerbin escape burns and whether it's feasible to just burn straight up just before sunset or dawn, depending on where you're going. Ostensibly the Oberth effect should favour craft doing their acceleration nearer the planet, and one has to climb out of the entire gravity well anyway, so gravity drag shouldn't be any more of an issue than it is for escaping from a circularized orbit. Experiments did not support that hypothesis, though. To test the Thomas Foolery I slapped a kerbal flight engineer chip on the side of the Kerbal-X, gave myself an arbitrary target of 9Gm solar periapse, and tried three techniques, then recorded the delta-v left aboard: gravity turn => low, circular orbit (around 70km) => escape parallel to kerbin's orbit straight up and out, just before the sun hit the top of the VAB to make up for kerbin's rotation and give a good ejection angle pre-noon launch => gravity turn => go east, no circularization The first two were method one--first launch left 1717m/s left in the tank after a rather sub-optimal burn, and KE got mad on my second test, so I had to calculate the 1747m/s based on ship mass and fuel remaining. Next I tested straight up and out--1532m/s, 1544m/s, 1538m/s remaining...seems like straight up and out sucks butts, even with a very good ejection angle. Finally the gravity turn with aggressive escape--1698 w/ suboptimal launch timing, then 1770 w/ better timing. 'Seems the Oberth portion of the hypothesis holds. So I see that there's something to getting orthogonal with the gravity field as soon as one can, but I'm not too sure why. Does burning orthogonally at periapse avoid gravitational losses climbing out of the gravity well altogether, rather than just delaying them? Does climbing straight up make too much of the burn happen further out from the planet, reducing the Oberth effect significantly? I'm beginning to sense a brain fart on my part.

Behold! The magnificently stupid Puddle Jumper Mk1 EX!Weighing in at just under 1.3 tonnes wet it uses an ion engine to hover at .99 TWR on the Mun, hopping over craters and catching sweet air off ramps. With RCS thrusters and spaceplane wheels capable of over 63m/s on Kerbin, a single z100 battery pack somehow good for 8 second hops in darkness, it's too big for a cargo hold and has to have its second probe core that actually faces prograde be selected and given control before it can even be used. Unadvisedly, I clamped it upside-down on top of the Kerbal-X to send it to the Mun for field testing, resulting in...questionable maneuvers to get it down to the surface. The tests were fairly successful, though: Significantly damaged, it can still take off from the lunar surface, and probably has the delta-v to return to Kerbin. Even severely damaged, it proves surprisingly capable. My piloting, however, might leave a bit to be desired. It sure is fun to crash, though.

Oooh, yes...waypoints for rovers would be sauce of significant density.

Yeah, I've had that happen a decouple of times.

Ah, not unlock, but reveal. Not all is clear from a great distance, one should expect curious new areas of interest to be discovered upon having a closer look, be it with a better telescope, a direct visit, or a mapping satellite to perhaps pierce the clouds of Eve with radar or IR optics.

I'd say build them out as part of the science archives and map view over the course of observations. Start with basic areas of interest identified from telescopes at the tracking station, with less detail further from Kerbin and more detail as the center's upgraded. Add new areas of interest with fly-bys, orbiting/landing craft and mapping satellites based what regions they pass over and how close, with lower passes revealing more detail (like those little sub-biomes scattered around the flats). Rovers, of course, would simply reveal the areas they traverse, discovering biomes as they go. As biomes are discovered, they'd be added to the map and to the science archives as new areas to gather science from.

Hahha, if they're changing how fuel flow works, Kashua will have to remake this thing.

I found myself pushing my giant asparagus-storm Eve-return lander along with a ring of 6 nukes under FL-800 tanks, with fuel lines drawing out of the central Kerbodyne tank fueling a KR-2L. Intent was to use the KR-2L as a kicker motor to add needed TWR for Kerbin escape, then turn it off for the rest of mission. It's not often that one pipes fuel out of central stack, but it worked out surprisingly well, and left the transfer vessel amusingly reusable. The lander actually had an ion-based kerbin return system, so the main transfer stage is still floating out there in case I ever want to bring Gilly home or something. XD

For me, much what I build is sufficiently experimental (giant ion ships, heavy one-shot-to-eve landers, something I've called "SpiderParty") that it winds up needing a custom lifter. Not that I don't use sub-assemblies--indeed my folder is full things like thrust plate templates, "kerbal inclusion pods" for lawnchair designs, weird modular xenon fuel pods, and no less than three files devoted to the reconstruction of just one of Whackjob's massive tower-lander legs (intended for a heavy EVE lander)--but it seems that using sub-assemblies for complex modules like entire lifters never works right. I lose most of my struts and fuel pipe connections (the items are still there, but in an unconnected state...the Derpatron 4k EX was particularly bad about that) and in some cases the thing ghosts weirdly, and I wind up with duplicate parts clipping completely, causing the kraken to start break-dancing on the pad as soon as physics kicks in. As such, I either build a custom lifter under the payload until KE tells me I've around 4km/s in it, or I use a lifter sub-assembly purely as a guide and replicate it in situ.