Jovus

Thanks for all your help, guys! It's nice to see it's not just me being entirely incompetent. I ended up going with a drop-pod solution Figured it out with your input. I give you: the Hermes 2 https://kerbalx.com/Jovus/Hermes-4 My problem came largely in two parts: 1) I didn't realize I could manually transfer fuel between tanks (thought I needed another building upgrade) and 2) I thought the engine nacelle only had 40 fuel, not 150! (Shows me for just assuming I knew things instead of reading part descriptions). To address a couple specific questions or pieces of advice: First, the tailplane and control surface design. I'm coming from FAR and I plan to go back to it. The dual tailplane is for yaw and roll stability at higher altitudes (and it's not enough, frankly, but I'm willing to compromise that far). The same goes for the control surfaces - that and I don't have any electricity generation on the craft, and I'm using TAC-LS, so I don't want to drain my batteries just to keep the nose up. That said, I recognize the validity of the criticism, I'm just playing with a handicap. I started with the Thuds because I started with a single core; once I moved to three cores the Rockomax engines were quickly replaced with LV-909s. I'm not using anything like nukes or even ramp intakes because I don't have them. I just unlocked the Panthers and don't even have a Mainsail yet. When my Space(plane) Program truly gets off the ground I'll definitely be switching over to LV-Ns, because who wants to bring oxidizer everywhere? I was frankly shocked at the suggestion to add more wing area. Not only would more wing add more mass (and more drag), but also the plane feels like it flies just fine to me. Does anyone want to expand on why more wing area might be a good idea? Again, I really appreciate all the help here. Thanks guys!

Hi all. I have some very specific mission requirements that I've toodled around with and haven't yet gotten to work. So I've decided I need some help from the forums. Right now I'm using 2 Thuds for rockets and 3 panthers for jets. My intakes are engine nacelles and a circular intake on the front of a Mk1 Inline; I don't have ram intakes yet. I'm using stock aero, not FAR (which is a first for me). Here, have a link to the craft file: https://kerbalx.com/crafts/13522/ and a picture: It needs to be able to get at least 2 passengers (preferably more, but I'll fly more missions) into orbit, rendezvous with a station in 125km x 125km (not dock), and re-enter. I'm comfortable with a bingo fuel reentry. Right now it gets into an 85km x -60km suborbital trajectory. My flight pattern involves getting up to Mach 2.5 around 15km on afterburners, then cutting over to rockets for the rest of the flight (keeping jets on until they starve out for the extra savings). I originally tried a single-core plane without the extra fuel on the front; it behaved similarly, but I had to enter a shallow dive from 10km to punch through the Mach barrier. I'm comfortable doing that, if it works, but with 3 Panthers this is just point and zoom. What modifications do I need to make to make this work? Am I flying it correctly, or is there a more efficient profile? I haven't flown SSTOs since 0.90, and I haven't flown stock SSTOs ever (I'm a FAR aficionado momentarily exiled by my potato computer). Thanks pre-emptively for your help.

Inside the visible portion of the truss is a very carefully arranged cubic octagonal strut. I believe the contract came from the "Giving Aircraft a Purpose" mod, though I'm not 100%.

Jonesing for RSS. But while I wait, mucking around: What do you do if you have a contract to deliver an 8 tonne 2.5m payload a quarter of the way around the world and all you have is Mk 2 parts? Some people would use a suborbital rocket. Those people are smart. Me, I built this monstrosity beauty: At the end there, I didn't have the heart or the patience to limp the airframe back home, Though I did have the fuel. So I hit the abort, which breaks off the front of the aircraft and opens a parachute for safe landing. I did manage to land the payload within 10 meters of the drop point.

I've lost one Kerbal in my current save. He was stranded on the Mun by some other space program and I was sent to pick him up. When I got there, he clipped through the terrain and went poof. I don't rescue landed Kerbals who aren't mine anymore. (Which means I don't rescue landed Kerbals.)

I was a little confused by this thread until I remembered that no, KER isn't stock, that's a mod I download. Then I was tempted to vote 'no' because I doubt KSP will ever include anything quite as slick as KER (though I've been pleasantly surprised before. Thanks for the Enhanced Navball, Squad! Anyone remember what the navball used to look like? I don't.) I ended up voting yes, because I'm a snarky git, but ultimately don't want to sabotage KSP.

The same way games with an Ironman mode function presently: when you want to quit, KSP does its own quicksave (in a separate slot from any quicksaves you've made) and then when you reload KSP it loads that quicksave. (I'm not saying we should make KSP Ironman, just borrowing their solution.)

I like the proposals in the OP, with one change. Simulations decided on beforehand shouldn't cost anything. By definition you can't keep any results of your simulation, so you're already spending playing-time with something you know doesn't materially advance your progress in the game; it shouldn't cost you money on top of this. You can spend your entire session in simulations if you want, and that doesn't bother me, because you won't be getting more science or more money out of the deal. We shouldn't discourage people from being careful if we're trying to encourage them to be careful. I like the idea of a costly revert, though. We can thrash out what the exact costs should be, but I lean toward expensive. If I'm reverting, it's for two reasons: to save the crew from disaster, or to make sure an interplanetary setup is perfect (e.g. aerobraking at Duna). I'm willing to pay a surcharge for that to discourage me from using quicksave/quickload in other cases. As for bugs and the avoidance thereof, I agree with Alshain. However, I've thought of something that might work: when you enable either costly reverts or no reverts, the game autosaves periodically (like it already does), but unlike at present you can revert to the last saved point. Further, the game should keep two: one current, one previous, so that you can go further back in case of a bug-strike. This shouldn't cost you, and it wouldn't be simply the same as our current system of reverts or quicksaves/quickloads because you don't get to make a decision as to when the game decides to autosave.

I have played this game since 0.23 (Not as long as many, but long enough.) I have landed probes on Duna (and Ike) once, and done nothing else interplanetary unless a quick jaunt out for solar science counts. I play with KER and KAC, so finding and utilizing transfer windows is no trouble for me. Why haven't I gone further, done more? First, I semi-like playing in career mode. I like the progressive unlocks, and I like being constrained by money. At the same time, I generally find the contract system to be a grind (though I haven't experienced it much past 0.90). Second, I always have grand plans. I want an orbital station with regular resupply runs (using TAC-LS) from my spaceplane of choice. I want a Mun fuel refinery and orbital station (also with resupply runs). I play with RemoteTech a lot, so I also want strong com systems in the Kerbin system and also around Duna, Eve, and Jool. I want to transition to primarily using spaceplanes, with rockets only for putting up massive payloads that won't easily fit in cargo bays. You get the idea. Third, I tend to play KSP off-and-on. I play a lot of KSP, but I get tired of it and do other things/play other games. Fourth, I like mod-sets. One run I've had was with KSP Interstellar. Then one on RSS (which I'll go back to when I get my real computer back). So on and so forth. So, as a whole, I tend to get bogged down a bit in the home system, then take a small break after my fifth or tenth or fiftieth orbital rendezvous, and then SQUAD comes out with a new release and I just chuck it all and start over again. If we didn't have another feature-rich release for about a year or so, I'd probably actually finish some of my plans. As it is, I'll be restarting everything for 1.2, of course, because Antennae! etc.

Think of the prices you could charge for your vintage at wine tastings, though! "Yes, our Chateau de Zeus is distilled in barrels treated with the purest sulfur directly from Io, and it's only $10,000 a bottle."

Read the first couple pages, but there are 46 now. What's the memory and processing hit for your mod? I'm playing on a real potato here, so that I haven't (for example) installed RemoteTech because it (eventually) bogs things down too much. I like a lot of features of your mod, especially the life support bits, but I'm worried that it will eat too much, especially the satlink stuff. Aside, and probably answered before (sorry!) do you have some kind of flight computer a la RemoteTech to allow you to program probes for when they lose connection?

Which is why you bind them to an action group so you can turn them off at 10-15km (depending on the needs of your launcher) and push the rest of the way to space on your LV-T45. Complete side note: I miss the days when all we had for engines was their designations.

Yes, I meant the supernovae. I still might have uses, depending. I'll need to contact my professor. (It'll take months before I get anything rolling, since I'm on another continent and not currently working on the project, so don't hold your breath.)

I, uh, might have uses for your data. Do you have supplementary survey data, like luminosity functions or metallicity?

Maaaan, you guys are really making me want some KSP plane action right now. But my good computer's on another continent.

I want to see the Falcon Heavy fly to orbit first before we talk about it sending stuff to Mars. Paper rockets are nice; they never develop problems that delay production or launch schedules or require a vehicle redesign.

My impression is that the primary problem with biofuel is that corn-based ethanol has a theoretical maximum EROEI of ~1.4, whereas conventional oil even these days has an EROEI of ~30, and even tar sands have an EROEI of ~10

And that's assuming your distribution model has a reasonable chance of being correct, which, with anything alien, is not a good assumption.

You seem to have missed the joke.

Oh, hey, look, here's this unknown material we found from the alien artifact. Let's just send it back to the lab medbay and get an answer in thirty seconds.

The counterion wouldn't exactly add weight. It'd be the Fe of the inside of the tank.

Delta V is, as other have said, the sum total of the change in velocity your rocket can make; i.e. how fast your rocket can go. This can be unintuitive at first. After all, you want to get to what you think of as a place, e.g. the Mun, Duna However, it starts to make sense when you realize that all the parts of the solar systems are moving , and in order to get to them, you have to match their velocity. It's a bit more complicated than that; e.g. if you want to orbit a body you obviously don't want to move exactly like it is (that's landing), but that's the basic idea. Delta-V maps will tell you how much velocity you need to gain or lose to do the various things on them (e.g. orbit Eve, land on the Mun) from wherever else you would like to start (usually the surface of Kerbin). Of course, you need to gain the velocity in the correct way (if you burn directly away from the Mun you usually won't get there), and delta-V maps usually are based on some minimum or close-to-minimum value.

The pretty blue glow of antimatter bottles (in movies) is provided by blue LEDs so you can see that the trap is working. Because, you know, otherwise you might be unsure. Something else might have made off with the city block your storage container lives in.

Your sense of the direction of history is reversed. The exceptions are dinosaurs, not innovations.

Indeed. The 'reusability' of the STS was practical for NASA as a way to retain much of the Apollo program's funding while pretending to cut costs. When it comes to SpaceX, my impression is that they want to drive this in reverse; i.e. increase launch rates with the promise of reusability. Which makes me wonder: is re-certification of a 1st stage faster than the manufacture of a new one? Quite possibly. It remains to be seen.