funk

Thx for the badge, I've another one coming which engineers internally call "draggy-toast", against that the asteroid shuttle is a beauty . In the meantime I've something more eye pleasing for you: The rework of my old shuttle design, especially the external tank and boosters. I'm trying to fly the RTLS abort mission but it's really hard due to stupid SAS to simulate the engine failure if it isn't the center one... maybe I'll have to go the alchemist way and code some stuff in kRPC for it.

Hey, in preparation for my mun base missions, I designed two Shuttle Dropships/Dropship Shuttles/Dropshuttles ... I still need a name for them (suggestions are welcome!). During testing one was enhanced as Kerbin edition, so I could fly around and vertically land on Kerbin. I guess that was the time I realized, with some adjustments it might be a good asteroid hauler. Because I've never finished STS-9 with my old shuttle designs, here is a short clip with the new one. Enjoy!

To say it loosely after Neil Tyson: "There are only two reasonable incentives to spend money on space exploration; 1. You don't want to die. 2. You don't wanna die poor." @michal.don Back in the days there was a challenge on reddit which you perhaps want to modify and include in your test missions. I'll be back soon with my mun base missions. Engineering is done, it's time to go to space again.

Yeah! Badges - I like! And TOTM.. Noice!

@hoioh@Klapaucius@beomagi Thank you all for your hints. It led me to some thinking. My conclusion is, that the weird behaviour has to do with the shifting of COM. During lift-off your COM is shifting backwards, due to thrust and usually a slight positive AoA. As a result you get more g-force on your rear landing legs, which is good (beomagi). The opposite happens while braking and that's what causes my craft to go left and right. I'll test a bit and see if there is anything I can do to prevent this.

If you're into building planes maybe you @hoiohor anyone else can explain to me why all the wheels are going bonkers while braking without SAS activated. I cannot remember when it was that hard to keep the craft straight.

Thx, my first thought was that I would use the fighter style plane, go into a flat spin and recover it before it hits the ground. Turned out to be way easier. Engine? Its a stock fake of a prop. Just used some junos... the craft is on kerbalx if you want to have a look . It was ment to be a replica therefore function follows form.

As promised, here my attempt(s): The landing of the first aircraft had to be more gentle. The second one could take a hit, but lift-off was most probably only possible because of low fuel load.

@hoioh Thx for your reply, I've seen your clip and really enjoyed it. The steep diving was awesome. I've tested two crafts already and both made it in one piece after some crashing... One is even ment to land on water. It's all about how you approach that lake. I'll make a video after I've updated the craft with new parts.

This sounds like fun, I'll give it a try... One question though, what defines as a seaplane? Can I take one of my aircrafts which wasn't build to land on water but it does?

It's probably the drag of the asteroid what flips your craft. Press F12 and you'll see. You might want to balance drag, for instance with airbrakes.

@Artienia Can you post a picture of your catcher pls, maybe we can figure out what's happening. @Ozelui Damn, I had the same plot for my mun base. I guess we'll see a remake soon.

Oh, ok didn't read your post exactly enough and missed the most important word... reusable... ehm... just a feeling here, but the extra fuel might be virtually deadly. I think you know best that the energy of the first stage at boost back might be too high to accomplish your goal... Lagrange sends his greetings. But you never know... When I've some time I will test some stuff and see if it's feasible. Interesting for sure. Which "payload" mass would you consider?

Do you mean tubes? They don't occlude stuff inside from aero forces. Don't know if it's the same for engine plates and shrouds. Wolfhounds are ugly, but ok... If you push your first stage above 25km they should be viable. Depends on the mass of the second stage. My favorite is still Mammoth/Vectors for the first stage and aerospikes for the second. Third stage is more or less just circularization and going home. So with some fiddling, a TSTO should be possible.

This is why I want the MH entries be considered stock. I don't want people to not be able to use these parts which reduce part cound and make designing a shuttle more comfortable, while bringing no serious advantage. I like most of the new parts in MH. Some of them are useless atm, because of buggy implementation. I hope they'll get fixed, soon(TM). A key of this challenge is imho the freedom to design what somehow fits the rules of a shuttle. Otherwise we wouldn't see such a great variety of ships here. I think this challenge should accept MH as stock as it is without nitpicking parts or engines, even if some are misplaced or have weird stats compared to the existing ones. In case that Squad decides to change some properties later on, fine. But nothing we can influence directly. TMLSS: "Take it all or nothing!" I'd go for an orbital period of 6h +-1s or so. Easier and meets the requirements better than a fixed altitude.

The first part is more or less about some basics of the Gaia, instruments, launch, orbit etc. @35min the part about measuring starts and links to the second part, which shows basic illustrations for the calculations, error deviation, some simulations and results and finally questions from the audience. The german subtitle (auto-generated) is mostly accurate. Don't know if it's possible to extract it somehow. At any point I'm willing to help to translate if there are questions.

To emphasize @Streetwind's statements:

RCS Build Aid is what you're looking for, shows torque at COM/ACOM/DCOM and many more things which are useful for building.

Finally I'm able to answer. The forum was bugged out for me. First: I'm not an expert I can just repeat what a guy involved in this mission presented on his slides: Gaia has a 1GPxl camera and the downstream to 3 ground stations (Spain, Australia, Argentinia) is between 3 to 8 Mbit/s at approx. 6 hours a day. From 2014 until Nov 2017 46.6TB of data has been transferred. There are several tricks to reduce the amount of data that needs to be transferred. Gaia is rotating so the sky is rotating over the focal plane. The onboard cpu detects the objects of both telescopes first and determines where and when they will be pictured on the focal plane. While most of the sky is black, only a square around each star is cut out and stored/transfered (with timestamp). If there are many stars, e.g. when looking at the starry line of the milkyway, storaging is needed and it will be transfered later. Beyond that it's very interesting what needs to be considered to finally get the correct results. The most obvious is light bending around the sun, Jupiter or other planets. Or the incoming scattered light. To reach a significant result for the movement, each star is crossing the focal plane up to several hundred times over the years. Every crossing takes about 4.5s on the focal plane. Because a star seems to have an elliptic movement over time it needs many crossings to calculate a significant mean value. Further from each star meeting certain requirements (brightness) Gaia takes a spectra. If you understand german I can give you a link to the presentation.

There was a post in 2016 about ESA's Gaia mission in this forum. Because it's kinda old and this is more about the results, I started a new one. For all of you who are interested in astronomy there is a very interesting application called "Gaia Sky" of the Center for Astronomy of University Heidelberg, which charts all the objects and their parameters measured by Gaia. You can find more informationen and download it on their homepage. The Gaia mission is still running and the next data release (DR2) with even more accurate data is expected in April 2018.

I've a medium pc (i5 [email protected], AMD RX 480 8GBVRAM, 16GB RAM). What helped me the most was memgraph. If you've enough RAM it can provide a relatively smooth gameplay and the stutter will only occure every 10 min.

Thx for the badge. The bioluminescence is from the Spectra mod, originally taken from Astronomer's Visual Pack.

Funkyndustries mission control sent a few kerbonauts to Laythe, they forgot to send an engineer, so the crew could stay a little bit longer and take a few days off... I will upload the craftfile tomorrow to kerbalx. Uploaded! See my signature... have fun!

Thx for your reply. For the first part here is a screenshot of the lander in the VAB : https://imgur.com/pKy11B5 When I cut the video, I'm always uncertain, which parts need to be with UI so that viewers can see the stats. It might be way easier to show the UI all the time, but imho it ruins the picture somehow. In the clips I made so far, at least in the map you can see the important numbers in the hud. It's a balancing act. Same goes for acceleration of the original footage and the cuts, cause I don't like to watch videos longer than 10 min. I'm trying to let you see the important information without having to many jump cuts. Sometimes I cut scenes which have been done a thousand times before, like a rendevouz. I'm still learning here and the cutting programm I'm using sometimes is a b.... . If you don't know already, you can slow down the replay speed in the settings on youtube. It has been a while, when I released the first episode of the Duna missions, in which I finished Duna STS-1, landed Duna STS-2 and docked it to the station. Don't worry you had probably more important things in your head than KSP at this time. https://youtu.be/zC4BpyGccNM?t=240

Congrats to your degree. I'm for sure not scared to ride on new bridges... maybe you can fix the self-deconstructing old ones. Enjoy your leisure until you start your job. I hope you've got some. To all the other participants here: I'm glad to see so many different designs and approaches. I always find some bits which really impress me. Imho this wide field in terms of gameplay makes this challenge the best of all kerbal time. Keep it up! Speaking of time... my barely existing time to play KSP is planned out to finish the Laythe mission and I'm hopeful to show you a special one to Eve before the update hits. In the meanwhile I've finished the Duna video Ep. 2. Enjoy!